A Prairie Account Poem by Marck Riggins

The prairie, pristine, parted ways with family foundations. Once watched over as by kin, the towering windmill sifted twists mournful refrain in solitude: isolation reserved to forgotten, treasured, tortured remembrances. Each unceremonious revolution in the windmill’s monotonous motion is a staggered timepiece for measure of days and months blended indiscriminately idle. The embers in field’s unharvested grain, returned hues from the sun in rolling waltzed swells, prodded forth, possessing the landscape.

What teal sky, what steel sky, seals the unsigned letter of memory, vast, deep and longing, that sojourners return to fire its hearth? Before dilapidation and dry rot, before termite and terrestrial armies usurped peace of mind, music blessed a household in sweet, told ties. Each run of clapboard siding had been a stanza, supporting the belief that these walls talked and sang in familial reverie.

The most frequent tenant, racing through vacant rooms and hollowed eye windows, is the vagrant wind. The vacillating coil-rushes bow the rye and barley in elemental superiority, sweeping out, scattering waves wondrous world, amber and gold, hissing.
Cloud’s stratospheric theater assembles, hovering in dissolution by reason of distant jet-streams, above. Such players abide their role as foreground before the limitless expanse outside the sunlit firmament.
Late in the afternoon mulls moaning breezes, blustery, touching their stiff fingers upon weathered wood, wanting no more sun, whose heat disintegrates former integrity of trees, tenured. Meandering airstreams pass by the abandoned hopeful, only in circling back to allude to an intended greeting, that yields no friendship.

The windmill blade’s cracked wheel for a clock face, counts down elements measure of wind, sun, water and overlooked earth, which combine to deliver death in convening collapse…
Red brick chimney, fires long-extinct, accents the blood-thistle, which fraudulently blends as no chameleon among burnished density of grain. On the hazy horizon, an ancient satellite hangs, distant, detached having hosted heralding for new homesteads and old refrains in rustic ruin.