On June 15th we announce that the collection Having Listened by Gary Whited had been named the winner of the first annual Homebound Publications Poetry Prize. On September 7th we will at least celebrate the release of this poignant book. Having Listened offers a collection of poems that speak from the confluence of a childhood on the prairie remembered and an encounter with the haunting voice of Parmenides echoing across 2500 years. These poems might draw you into your own listening places, to places unheard before, to places whose voices have been forgotten or half remembered. To give you a glimpse into this award-winning collection, we offer the opening poem in the book, Prairie. Visit our bookstore for more information or to pre-order your copy>>
Prairie
Wind sweeps across this picture
Meadowlark on barbed wire, yellow breasted door
opens with its song
Weathered fenceposts hold the wire
Below the ground they slowly rot
Wind almost everyplace in this picture
Shirts on the clothes line, their sleeves ripple
The rattlesnake suns her long body on the scoria outcropping,
her skin flutters above her like worn flags
Magpie flickers through chokecherry bushes
at the edge of the creek
The black fruit sweetens in the long light
Beneath the wind
Do not forget the badger, who digs alone
into the sod and the silence
While high above, wind carries the Rough-legged hawk
on her long hunt
Over wheat fields that move in waves across the field,
each stalk tossing its head like water
And as far as eye can see,
the shadow of anything standing ripens twice each day