Roy Beckemeyer

Under Prairie Skies

We make daily withdrawals from
our allotments of tears, hail storms,
stillborn children, sit staring at
the Spartan silence of burial plots,

remember grandfathers who spent
their days wresting land from the prairie,
acre by acre, who claimed it
with hedgerows, section lines,

cemeteries, dream that our children,
building lives on these difficult bones,
will lift their eyes to that far horizon
where stars and earth collide.

Roy Beckemeyer‘s book, Music I Once Could Dance To (2014, Coal City Press, Lawrence, KS) was a 2015 Kansas Notable Book.