I take you to dance
In your dress of blue.
Santana’s black magic woman is playing tonight.
Swaying to the music, I wonder about your true home,
Your tangled story, your fine shelves of books.
I have an ocean of questions but a thimble of time.
Maybe The Art of War will be there.
Maybe a classic of the ancients, something curious and modern,
Written in ink dark, lustrous as your hair.
I want to turn pages tonight,
The secret histories rewritten
To remember us…
You walk away when the boun is done without a word.
I, watching like a period becoming an exclamation point,
Laugh, filled to the edge where the soul meets the body.
We, the momentary.
Oft' my thoughts drift back through the mists of time,
To my childhood and my humble Indiana home,
Those blissful days of youth so carefree and sublime!
My memories of those blithesome days would fill a tome!
When I hear, "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far away",
Along its slopin' banks I can see the towerin' sycamores,
Dancin' in the breeze on a languid Hoosier summer's day,
And I see a boy with willow pole catchin' catfish by the scores!
The Wabash flows silently through the verdant Indiana plain,
Meanderin' through forests and many a sleepy Hoosier town.
How I pine to return to the soil of my birth once again,
To be that barefoot boy amblin' to the Wabash a-fishin' boun'!
Robert L. Hinshaw, CMSgt, USAF, Retired
© All Rights Reserved
Placed No. l in Barbara Gorelick's "A River Runs Through It" Contest - Jul 2011