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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