The metal scythe like science-fiction machinery whirring passed the farmhouses as dusk enclosed them willingly, soft keystrokes chimed across the fields to the north to sour the fall of the denizens makers are wild on the hunt, but those felled by this reaper took the brunt of the scorned, so this was their last look upon the earth in all realities, the bell chimes for those, and this reaper shalt battle through that first course of lesser bushes and miserly zeal.
Sunday drive
Sunday morning out for a drive
Windows down feeling alive
Open road open air
Following the road going nowhere
Country roads are a continuous thing
Fences and pastures a colorful scene
The thoughts of childhood flood my mind
A carefree life, a carefree time
Country roads country miles
Old farmhouses country style
No traffic, no worries, no stress on this trip
Any sign of stress I plan to skip
Beautiful houses and age-old barns
Country roads with country charm
Driving alone windows down
Positive feelings, I've escaped from the town
Passing by places, I"ll always remember
Leaves are turning; it's mid-September
As a boy, I'd bike for miles and miles
Thinking of that time, I begin to smile
I'm on the road again, but now I'm much older
Stop for a while, pulling onto the shoulder
Out of my car, I begin to walk around
Those childhood dreams are what I've found.
Lpickard
Chasing the golden sun across America,
Expressing wonderment at the vastness
Of the Great Plains, distant farmhouses
Dwarfed by gigantic silos awaiting harvest.
Four lines from "Across the Great Plains"
Written August 24, 2021
Abstracted August 30, 2021
Submitted to "Liberum Divisa 7" Poetry Contest
Sponsored by Gregory Richard Barden
Racing toward the deep blue horizon,
Chasing the golden sun across America
Expressing wonderment at the vastness
Of the Great Plains, distant farmhouses
Dwarfed by gigantic silos awaiting harvest
Tall soldier-like windmills standing guard
While cattle graze, tails twitching like metronomes
To the beat of the clackity-clack road noises.
FIRST PLACE WINNER
written August 24, 2021
Brian Strand "Verse Freed" Poetry Contest
March 4, 2022
Of Mice and Men-Mills
David J Walker
And Speaking of Steinbeck
The Jobe family could have
Lived here or there
Pointing to the bones of
Clapboard farmhouses on
Their last legs
In some places
they could have plowed
for 50 years and still
harvested nothing but
white rocks
those who say they
remember really
don’t want to recall
Windmills unable to
Pump enough water
To make any difference
Such ghostly places
In plane sight
dot the farm fields down
old market roads of
West Texas where the wind
Still blows
Refusing to stop
America the Beautiful
The heartland of America of peace and old farmhouses,
the country I read about as a young man it is still there
although news we are served is of riots and mass shooting.
Sturdy farmers in blue overall at the bottom of the road
have collections of old stuff from recent past things
collected for the love of it, but you can buy some if they
feel like selling, canny know the value of scrap metal
Nice roads in a green landscape and tall three, and no
police sirens scream around winding corners and bullets
do not fly through the air hitting a child.
This is America the beautiful, I will go there someday,
perhaps buy a rusty old Dodge that has been standing under
a tree for twenty five years-who cares- and talk to the old
farmer about this and the sorry life of city dwellers.
My mother sits at the kitchen table,
smoking slowly and thoughtfully,
the TV too loud.
Those first years we had bedrooms
we never slept in.
I had nightmares
and she preferred the ledge,
the midnight trains,
just outside her window.
Streaking skyward the tracers rip
Into hanging soldiers
Falling about into mayhem
Pulsing through blood-filled ears
Hearing comrades scream
Understanding nothing
This is the war I found…
Hatred filled hardened hunter
Into smashed building
Homes pulverized rubble
Strewn about the decaying mass
The scorched metal burning
Bodies of the fallen men
The miasma of war I forever inhale…
Tigers rolling through billowed flame
Firing upon burnt battlefield blindly
Retreating in terror I leave the voices
Calling as I my boots tamp by arms
Reaching for safety I couldn’t render
Brothers abandoned in the Arnhem snow
These are the ghosts of war who haunt me….
Battle’s percussion on the horizon distant
I fade through the fields upon the Rhein
Farmhouses glow a midnight path
Walking to the beat of gun fire echoes
Off the walls of a shelter a little boy sits
Unafraid of the man feeding him chocolate
In the crater of a bomb…
This flash of hope my salvation from war.
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