Home Skies by Judy Brackett

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Home Skies
by
Judy Brackett

May I borrow a springtime prairie sky

stretching from here to everywhere

with colors of birdsong

with wind and traveling clouds

with Sandhill Cranes by the thousands

flying in

dancing

feeding in the winter fields

sleeping in the shallow Platte

pausing on their long journey to ice.

One sleetfalling December dawn

I’ll toss that wide sky above

the Ponderosa arrow tips

and let it warm

this winter place

will give it back in a day or two

need it only now and then

to remember where I started

where I sometimes want to be

for a little while.

And later when I’m far from home

beneath the same but always different

prairie sky the horizon impossibly far away

I’ll ask to borrow my own

Sierra blue hemmed in

by those pines those mountain tops

a smaller stretch of blue

to remind me of my borders

of my own safe nest

in this world.

Judy Brackett has published short fiction and poems in various journals and, most recently, in The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets (Backwaters Press). She has taught creative writing and English composition and literature at the community college level. Born in Nebraska, Judy moved to California as a child and has lived in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills for many years with her husband, photographer Gene Crowe. Judy has three grown children, four grandchildren, a lively border collie, and a geriatric cat.

jedolphin:
Being a native Midwesterner -- Iowa -- and have been through Nebraska going to, YES, California, many years ago now -- this poem sets a sense of place -- the heartland -- so well. Ended up on the other coast -- Maine it's mountains and tall pines -- WELL, unless you KNOW the prairie -- you don't -- looking out at the Atlantic here "reminds", but will never take the place of that rolling land -- which is never flat -- open better describes it -- as you have.
Posted 12/30/2013 06:36 AM

Jo:
Thanks Judy, An impressive poem, the imagery beautiful, meaningful. And Ross thanks for reminding me--Thank you Jayne.
Posted 12/29/2013 12:42 PM

Ross Kightly:
I've been looking at old photographs of my own native land from the other side of the world and the skies are what I remember as being most characteristic... thank you for this one, Judy and Jayne.
Posted 12/29/2013 11:03 AM

daswan2:
Wonderful poem - Amazing Imagery. Thank you Judy for the poem and thank youJ Jayne Jaudon Ferrer for sharing it.
Posted 12/29/2013 08:48 AM

Larry Schug:
Beautiful, Judy. You do a wonderful job painting with words.
Posted 12/29/2013 07:56 AM

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