Landscape With Silos
One nail sticking up in a pile of boards,
air bladders from fish brought home for supper,
sugar in green glass bowls,
glittering rattlesnakes.
The palsied ghosts of cloudstained women,
shadows of railroad men far from their homes
a deep-freeze filled with molasses cookies,
broken concrete, lilacs, thunder.
We drank water from old pipes,
picknicked under windbreaks, peach pits
and eggshells, and in the glove box
roadmaps to the river, to the reservation,
to Fargo and Minot. But no maps
to the silos where men tended missiles so big
we didn’t even dream about them.
They didn’t scare us, those missles,
not the men either who rose like bankers,
sat calmly at the counter, starched and pressed.
Keys jingled on their belts.
They ordered root beer and blackbottom pie.
Deborah Bogen is a poet and a novelist. Her poetry books, Landscape with Silos; Let Me Open You a Swan; and Living by the Children’s Cemetery are all prize winners.
HER NEWEST BOOK OF POEMS: “In Case of Sudden Free Fall” – is available from Jacar Press at jacarpress.com
Her novel series is titled “The Aldinoch Chronicles.”
Book One, THE WITCH OF LEPER COVE, is a tale of betrayal and hard-earned triumph set in 13th Century England. Alice, an herbal healer, is accused of heresy and imprisoned by the Inquisition. Can three orphans find the courage and the allies necessary to free her?
Book Two, THE HOUNDS OF GOD, follows Lily, Wyll and especially Edric as they grow to full adulthood. Edric travels to Paris where he discovers the Inquisition is still at work. Is it his destiny to battle Bishop Hugo at every turn?