A Poem Reworked

Read Write Poem is certainly stretching my poetry muscles in a good way. The prompt this week was to stop thinking about revising a poem and actually do it. OK, Juliet was much more gentle with the prompt, but this is what it meant to me. So I took a poem written in January 2008 for a Writers Island prompt and reworked it.

First the original:


Over the Horizon

The weather three states west would be ours
tomorrow, or the next day, depending on the wind.
Weather always made good time racing
across the space ironed flat by ancient glaciers.

From the back seat of the wood-paneled station wagon
the space between me and the horizon
was filled with rows of corn and soybeans
and a few trees here and there with something to prove.

The concrete interstate plowed a pale path
through green fields, due east ten miles to a gentle left-hand curve,
then straight as the crow flies to the middle of the next county,
never looking back.

Decades down the road,
I live past the curvature of the earth
from where I started.




Here's the new piece:


From Flatland

Giant steel grasshoppers sit contentedly in fields,
endlessly sipping ancient nectar from underground,
next to comforting night-lights of flaming natural gas,
unable to imagine life anywhere else.

The weather three states west will be ours
tomorrow, or the next day, depending on the wind.
It always makes good time racing
across the land ironed flat by ancient glaciers.

I lift my body's question mark
from the high school drinking fountain,
answering a different, distant call
to plow a fertile field elsewhere.

From inside the '68 Chevy station wagon my eyes
trace row after row after row of corn and soybeans,
filling the space between me and the horizon
save for the occasional tree with something to prove.

Straight as the crow flies, I follow
the pale, unbending concrete of the Interstate
past all those tidy, unchanging furrows
into the hazy, wavy shimmer ahead.