So This is Nebraska by Ted Kooser—National Poetry Month 2024

This one makes me homesick for those long, hot summer drives across it’s broad, flat expanse,  the pervasive smell of fresh cut alfalfa, grasshoppers splattering on windshields and stinging arms stuck out of the cranked-down windows, watching the wandering line of cottonwoods on the banks of the shallow river.

Born in Iowa in 1939 and a long time Nebraskan, Ted Kooser knows a thing or three about farming and the land.  It has earned him a Pulitzer Prize and two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate.  He is perhaps the greatest bard of the Plains breadbasket since Woody Guthrie.

Ted Kooser in his element.

So This is Nebraska

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop

over the fields, the telephone lines

streaming behind, its billow of dust

full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

 

On either side, those dear old ladies,

the loosening barns, their little windows

dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs

hide broken tractors under their skirts.

 

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday

afternoon; July. Driving along

with your hand out squeezing the air,

a meadowlark waiting on every post.

 

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,

top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,

a pickup kicks its fenders off

and settles back to read the clouds.

 

You feel like that; you feel like letting

your tires go flat, like letting the mice

build a nest in your muffler, like being

no more than a truck in the weeds,

 

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey

or holding a skinny old man in your lap

while he watches the road, waiting

for someone to wave to. You feel like

 

waving. You feel like stopping the car

and dancing around on the road. You wave

instead and leave your hand out gliding

larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

 

—Ted Kooser

 

So This Is Nebraska from Sure Signs. Copyright © 1980 by Ted Kooser.