Landward

With echoes of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, TWO BOULDERS IN REPOSE by Stan Winarski

In GATHER THE PRAIRIE by Curt Meine prairie seed collecting brings ancient promise.

DRAG RACING by Kelly R Samuels. Cars racing and revving in the city at night bring memories of another era in a small town.

THE LEAVES OF NOVEMBER by Kathryn Gahl. Leaves become dancers.

A barn is taken down, and dairy farm childhood memories rise with the chaff in DOWNFALL by Linda Schaller.

WRITE ME A POEM ABOUT LOVE, YOU SAY by Ronnie Hess portrays an older couple on a walk finding what endures.

In DRIVING HIGHWAY 29 poet Kate Maude drives her children to apple picking while facing family memories along the route.

WHERE THE SOUL IS MEANT TO BE by Elizabeth Farris portrays Horicon Marsh in its autumning as the poet, in the gesture of crane, speaks to migration.

In RAINY by Suzy Wedeward the curving roads of the Driftless Area are the shifting backdrop to memory.

OCTOBER IN FAVILLE GROVE by Catherine Young Poet Catherine Young considers Emily Dickinson’s lines that to make a prairie it takes a clover and bee and revelry, and spins a poem portraying the complexity of prairie in the interweaving of people. This poem was written for the Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance to celebrate the thousand acre prairie of Faville Grove Sanctuary near Lake Mills, Wisconsin.

THE SHORTEST DAYS by Minnesota Poet Laureate, Joyce Sutphen, from her collection Carrying Water to the Field. This poem for the time of the winter solstice anticipates the day’s end and night descending, while the people rise to meet it. WHAT REMAINS by Catherine Young holds the silvery memories of late December. The poem is from her ecopoetry collection Geosmin published in 2022 by Water’s Edge Press.

OLD FEY AUTUMN SIGHS by Wisconsin poet Donna Carnes is a villanelle that imagines a king of autumn letting go of his reign to the oncoming queen of winter.

AUTUMN SUNRISE by Wisconsin poet Jan Wellik captures the gold of November.

So many of us love wearing costumes for performances, and as children many of us became something other than what we were. HALLOWEEN by Catherine Young was published in Bramble in 2022.

In an abecedarian poem, the first letter of each new line spells the alphabet. THE RIPENING ABECEDARIAN by Catherine Young is from her collection Geosmin published in 2022 by Water’s Edge Press.

In OCTOBER by Robert Frost, the poet pleads with October to go slow. OCTOBER is in the public domain.

CONFLAGRATION INVOCATION is by Wisconsin poet Karen Ostrov. While watching over her toddler grandson in Oregon during the September 2020 wildfires and Covid 19 restrictions, the poet considers Rosh Hashanah 5781 and the binding of Isaac along with her role as a grandmother, sheltering her grandson for future generations.

Today the second reading from John Muir's book The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, written one year before his death in 1914. This gives us delightful insight into life more than 150 years ago traveling to America from Scotland on a rolling "bluff bowed boat" and discovering, in Wisconsin, new species of birds, animals and plants to delight the senses.

Wisconfluence is a series of four poems created for the MidWay Atlas, a seven-state Midwest artist project in 2022. WATER MEMORY is the contribution of Wisconsin Poet Laureate Laureate Kimberly Blaeser.