At the Pawnee National Grasslands
Colorado Eastern Plains
The only sound out here
is wind pouring through wind.
This is where the sun and moon
scrape into one another and blur.
The Chalk Bluffs. Buttes seemingly rise
out of their own stone coffins.
Mice bone cracks
the mouths of owls.
The world of the dead collides
with the world of the dead.
Hammerblows of wind pummel the dusk,
batter the buffeting at my feet.
The buffalo grass keeps bending
toward me, ploughing, pleading,
knowing it must go on, certain it will
one day get in. Get into me and through.
George Kalamaras served as Poet Laureate of Indiana in 2014 and 2015. He is the author of twenty-four collections of poetry (fifteen full-length books and nine chapbooks). One of his recent books, To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me (Dos Madres Press, 2023), just received the Indiana Poetry Book Award for the two-year period 2022–2023. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years.