POETRY ENCORE
Prairie Crossing, Nov. 30–Dec. 1, 2020 The sky was Colorado blue that morning. Not a snowflake or ice pellet hitting our car or the road or the ditches. Clear sailing. Frost sparkled the manila-folder fields after Ault, left the edges of trees blurry and white. The sun took care of that. With time. In eastern Colorado we intersected with swirling birds., Snow geese in a dozen waves queueing above us. Timing is everything, they say. Lucky us. In Nebraska, black birds hovered over and strutted through the gold sections, looking like polka dots on children’s pajamas. Crows or ravens? Then the ducks in ponds caught our attention. So many they needed to waddle over other backs to get to the other side. Mallards or teals?
38 | ENCORE DECEMBER 2021
By the time we reached Iowa, it was night. But the moon! It led us to Des Moines, past the blinking red lights of wind turbines, blinking, blinking. New frost in the morning, different fields. Cattle shivering on their thin feet. Haze lifting from rivers. And fewer trucks than we thought. We did not see the bison in Illinois. But eventually lake clouds, thick, yet without snow. A December plus. Then, a quick look at Indiana and on to Michigan. Enough to forget our Western dreams and stay steady. Home was just ahead. Warm rooms in our estate of clover meadow, oaks and pine. Home. Ahead. — Elaine M. Seaman Ordinarily, a visit to Colorado for Seaman and her husband is a 2½-hour, non-stop flight from Grand Rapids to Denver, but during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic they drove for two days to visit their son. The return trip to their home in Texas Township inspired this poem. Seaman is the author of the 2019 chapbook My Mother Sewed Dresses for Five, which included pictures of quilts she made that share titles with the poems. She also had a one-person quilt exhibition, Time to Finish, at the Carnegie Center for the Arts, in Three Rivers, this past summer.