Roy Beckemeyer

Leaning Westward

Sunrise stretching up behind us, the moon
fading to a watermark in the backlit sky,
we roll miles off I-70, watch rivers

go thready as the horizon expands into this
flatness that time has used to cap the Ogallala,

watch fields gradually go from square to circular,
cities wind down to scatterings of people spread
here and there over the wide landscape, while

cattle, once dotted across vast pastures, are now
crowded shoulder to shoulder in feedlot ghettos.

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