The buffalo herd turns its back to us like a quiet stream and drifts away.
Danger can register across a landscape simultaneously.
What the American prairie knows: every horizon, however occluded.
Season of cold dew and gumbo, when one needs hooves.
How grief is a shadow, how the shadow has a shape, cast from those who were alive.
The people lift their full plates, an offering to those who no longer taste.
The people do not feast half-heartedly.
Wild grasses lift into a fragrance, even if close up they have no smell.
Grasses so soft, like wading bare-legged, in velvet.
The earth is larger than we can imagine it, no matter, a half-learned place.
Which cannot be translated once the old languages are lost.
The wind can be described as a wave or as a surge, but never as both at once.
No one visits the prairie to be entertained.
When the mud swallowed the dinosaur whole, it preserved its strangeness for us.
Such astonishments in the display case: meteorites, ammonites, and gems.
Earth really does hold onto its lives.
The obsidian points were knapped narrow so they could pass between the ribs.
Poignant, not scenic. Like lark song, clouds always arrive from afar.
Melissa Kwasny, a Basin resident, is a former Montana state poet laureate. This poem was originally published in American Prairie Journal.
