To illustrate rise, the softest pinks and purples of an early morning sunrise from a quiet cove at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire.
To illustrate set, an ominous sunset after an unforgettable tornado and high winds slammed through Fargo, North Dakota, on an otherwise quiet, mid-summer day.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/rise-set/
This was just one moment on a road trip across miles of prairie. How could anyone find it aimless or repetitive. On this long-ago trip I watched two or three thunderheads and lightning storms take over the humongous sky across the miles. I veered off on gravel roads with signs that pointed to the homes of Lawrence Welk and Willa Cather’s Antonia and Laura Ingalls Wilder. With no one to direct my way or force me to race ahead, I stopped at will. A raw and unsettled feeling breathed new life in me. Maybe this was the moment that changed me forever. After this, I longed for more like this one. To feel the sky reaching out to me, lifting me off the ground. Like riding a roller coaster and falling into the sky.
I took this photo on a highway in North Dakota, when I was driving alone from Fargo, ND, to Pierre, SD. It was a long ride, and I must have gone through at least three rainstorms, complete with strong winds. Finally, the sky cleared as the sun went down. I still remember how it felt like I wasn’t attached to the earth out there — especially later, when I visited Saskatchewan and Alberta. It was as if I could have fallen right into the sky.
This photo was taken by my Dad in the Badlands of South Dakota in the late 1960s. I was standing near the edge of the platform, looking down into the abyss, and he was above us. We went camping with our cousins who lived in South Dakota on this trip. I remember that it was pretty cold, and we were freezing in the tent. I wish I could remember more about it, but I’m sure it was fun. I’m sure it wasn’t as much fun for my mother, who still had to cook for six kids and a husband on a little camp stove.
I don’t have many photos that work for this week’s photo challenge. It will be interesting to see what others have selected.
Headed for the sky.
On the Edge of the Plains
June 27, 2004, Fargo, N.D.
The highway peters out
to washboard gravel
on the edge of the plains,
where we are invited
to eat bison kabobs
and gooseberry cobbler
and slap mosquitoes
and swap stories.
In soft twilight we listen
to cottonwoods rustle
beyond the rhubarb
and Tom’s voice and guitar
roam through cowboy
tunes as this late June day
whispers vespers
on the edge of the plains.
Let this journey take us
where it will.
Big sky of the Saskatchewan province in Canada
Tonight I read through the poems I wrote on my trip to North Dakota and Saskatchewan during the summer of 2004. The poem below pays respect to William Stafford, a poet whose writings that I ate, breathed and fell asleep with during those six weeks. The 49th parallel is the border between the U.S. and Canada. My words echo his poem, “At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border.” It has been almost nine years since I visited this overwhelming space, and it is far away from my home on the Atlantic Ocean, but I can return by walking down these lines of words.
Reading Stafford at the 49th Parallel
This is the voice I carry, lines to wrap round me,
when I float too close to borders of despair.
This is the voice whose hope carves days,
where no hatred ever strays,
and green breath fills my mouth with prayer.
Birds still pilot blue skies unbound
above yellow fields that heave, swell, rise.
Led by you – I bless anew – this pass-through ground
charted by pursuit, desire, waste and greed.
Left behind for young dreamers to seed.
On the tall grass plains of Saskatchewan.
A few summers ago I spent six weeks in North Dakota and Saskatchewan studying the literature of the Great Plains, including the work of Wallace Stegner and Willa Cather. It was a wonderful experience to have so much time to devote to these writers who put their love of the land into their writing. Here is just one poem that came out of that summer.
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
Willa Cather, gravestone inscription, Jaffrey Center,NH
Chasing Cather
Her chiseled words gouge readers who edge too close.
But she didn’t linger long among white mountain pines.
Her ink still rents rooms in a scrabbling prairie town.
But she doesn’t haunt lanes humming dance tunes
Her desire scatters in grass, sky, wind, earth, tongues.
But she doesn’t watch pious suns kneel down in canyons.
Today a back door wandered open in a barren farmhouse.
Inside, she fingered cobwebs like strings on a foreign fiddle.
Common Ground Review, Spring/Summer 2008
Another difficult photo topic this week. So I thought of tiny from a different perspective. Last year when I visited Chicago with a group of friends, we took photos at the top of the Hancock Tower. When I looked at the photos tonight, I was surprised to see our reflections in this photo. Thought it offered an interesting comment on “tiny.”
The poem below is tiny, too. It’s about an evening a few years ago, when I went to a concert in Fargo, ND. I had never heard of Ralph Stanley, but I went anyway. He sang the song called “O Death,” which is on the soundtrack of the movie, “O Brother, Where Art Thou.”
I still remember how haunting the lyrics were as this very old and frail man sang to death, asking for one more year of life. So this is my “tiny” poem dedicated to Ralph Stanley.
Song for the Devil
for Ralph Stanley at the Fargo Theater
Your ancient keen
rattles the rafters
as you wind your way
through a plea to Death
for one more year.
You stand alone
on a stage of yellow wood
with fiddle hands folded,
while one beam of light
traps you in white fire.
We hold our breath
in a shadowed balcony
until Death stomps
downstairs and slams
an exit door behind us.
published in Prairie Winds, Spring 2007
These bison may only be a few years old. But when surrounded by a herd, you feel as if they know what human beings did to their kind just a few generations ago. It’s as if the knowledge of the blood baths is ingrained in their heavy hides.
“… I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping…”
— Willa Cather
In a Field of Bison
The small herd of domestic bison
plods away from us, heads swinging,
at the pasture’s far end.
We step carefully, snapping photos,
whispering, hoping for more than this.
Soon one is spooked, and the whole herd,
along with a dozen calves, swings around
to our flank and parades by, snorting,
chuffing and chewing. We pile
in a red pick-up that bumps slowly up
green pasture swells, and idles
at the crest as prairie rises and falls
on all sides of our tight circle
under a cumulus shimmer of blue sky.
I know so little about you,
but our kind has been imprinted
in your blood-soaked soul. You know
who we are, what we have done to you.
The heavy, humped bull, head to the side,
never, ever takes his eyes off us.
The sky after the tornado
New Englanders may think their weather changes by the minute, but I think the Midwest has them beat by a mile. Memories of my childhood include lots of moments just watching the sky change before my eyes. With nothing getting in the way like trees or suburbia, you could see what was ahead of you or what was racing up behind you. Clouds could take so many shapes and colors: green golf-ball shapes that bubbled and black banks of night that inked out the day and white cotton that blanketed the sky. Maybe that’s why the sky still captures me. I always feel its presence when I return for visits because it fills up the spaces so much more there.
This photo was taken in Fargo, ND, in 2004. The city’s tornado sirens had just stopped and I went outside and saw this sky. I found out that a tornado had touched down not far from the university housing where I was staying. I was in North Dakota and Saskatchewan for six weeks that summer and the tornado sirens went off at least four times during my stay. On those wide plains where wind was the only constant, it felt like you had to hold onto the earth with both hands.
Heading Home in a Storm
Jagged rage flicks overhead,
grumbles in primeval throat.
Maddened cloaks of sea green
shroud tunnels of tall corn.
Truck headlights skitter over
splintered cottonwood sentries.
You look back at rosy sunset,
then grind clutch,
spit gravel.
http://www.sliverofstone.com/Julia_Meylor_Simpson.html#Julia_Meylor_Simpson,_Heading
Between Land and Sky 