Time flies.
It seems such a short time ago that I was there in Iowa, participating in that study of biography ... but it was actually many years ago ...
We had come from all across the country that summer, people from various professions, gathering at the University of Iowa for an intensive study of biography.
I was one of the participants in that National Endowment for the Humanities seminar. I had looked forward to it as a means of escaping, if only briefly, a work situation with constantly demanding deadlines.
What could be better than to get far, far away from that, to focus on something entirely different?
Deadlines? Oh, we had those in the seminar ... every day. We had a mountain of reading material to cover, to digest, to discuss. It was definitely not playtime.
But it was valuable ... when I returned to work, and all these years later. It helped to steer me in the direction of more writing and, eventually, into what I'm still doing today, exploring the avenues of poetry and a bit of art.
Today's poem recalls one particular evening when we were invited out to the rural home of our seminar moderator.
I recall our standing on the porch ... but let's let the poem tell it:
AN IOWA NIGHT
Day's work done, we
gathered on a farm porch,
watching the lush, dark
corn trembling toward us
as rain slid
through the dusk.
No towering buildings
muffled the crumpling
thunder, no traffic
softened the sound
of plump drops spattering
thirsting shingles.
It was the velvet edge
of an Iowa night.
I have bridged back
to it many times, seeking
those faces, wondering
what happened next,
what the others became,
where they are now.
© 1997
(originally published in Midwest Poetry Review: also included in my first collection of poems, Chance of Rain, published by Finishing Line Press in 2003)
***
Today's word:
wondering
1 comment:
Your words you use to paint the feeling in this poem are beautiful. I've read this poem a couple times-from A CHANCE OF RAIN and here today. Each time it stirs up different things in me and and creates different pictures in my mind and different thoughts. I lived in South West Iowa and have folks in central Iowa. My brother got his PHD at Iowa State. I used to go to Univ. of Iowa football games. It was there at nine above zero that I asked myself why we lived there. I changed a flat tire at two above zero one night after teaching swimming at the YMCA and my hair was frozen on my head. A person can stand more than others think, or even than what you thought when you stand back and look at it. But back to the picture you painted. It is a restful, peaceful, place and a comfortable feeling that you could never get lost...roads all in square one-mile crosswork patches. I flew over and the corn was coming up and the brown dirt, tufted with green made it look like a chenille bedspread or a tied patchwork quilt. You seemed to always know what to expect there. You tied it all in a neat wonderful bundle.
And about deadlines...mine are fewer nowadays, and I love every second of that, but could use a prodding now and then.
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