IF THE WIND

by Aimee Geurts

If the wind doesn’t stop

I think I’ll go mad

If the wind doesn’t stop

I think I’ll go ma

If the wind doesn’t stop

I think I’ll go m a

If the wind doesn’t stop I think

by David Solheim

On my wall hangs an aerial photo

Of my grandparents’ farmstead, An award for soil conservation, Taken when I was ten years old.

I see the big willow tree

Where my cousins, my brother, and I Built a multi-level treehouse. The buckboard chassis we drove As a stagecoach or covered wagon In our westering imaginations. Abandoned among the rusting machinery, The horse-drawn binder where we Pretended to be farmers like our uncles.

If the wind doesn’t stop

If the wind doesn’t stop

I think I’ll go

At home in town, summer was filled With sandlot baseball games. In fourth grade I struggled with long division and penmanship, Read of dinosaurs and Viking myths, Envied families with encyclopedias. When the fire alarm blared, we marched Out to the monkey bars until the all-clear sounded. We curled under our desks hoping to survive Predicted tornadoes or Cold War bombings.

While we huddled a classmate’s Angry adolescent brother or Father losing a custody battle

Might spray the room with bullets

Riddling desks and bodies

Like prairie dog towns

Robbing me of sixty-five years, Making the green photograph

My last memory

Instead of the beginning.

Returning to the place of my childhood and finding beauty in the landscape I used to find ugly. Looking for home in the beauty and finding it easily. Oh, the colors!

DAVID SOLHEIM has published in more than 30 periodicals and had work included in five anthologies. His most recent book, A Week on the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers: Thoreau’s 1861 Minnesota Journey Revisited, and his four books of poetry are available at buffalocommonspress.com. He was the North Dakota Statehood Centennial Poet and is an emeritus Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota.