SENTINELS
Prairie grain elevators
Once one day wagon-trip spaced
Now lined along steel highways
Names high in tall font
Looming over dying villages
Standing in patient service
To the world’s bread basket
Amid featureless fields
With vanishing points
On roads in all directions
Never lost here
Sentinels always watching
Like giant desert cacti
Whispering on the wind
Over here over here
Watercoloured everywhere
To grace the walls
Of small town diners
Old farm kitchens
Summer fair craft tables
Old growth heritage wood
Douglas Fir drawn and quartered
Timber posts and beams
Wood grain carved
By grains on grains
Built stacked and cribbed
With corners overlapped
So strong yet now laid low
To build dance floors
And decorative furniture
Landmarks gone in time’s mist
Villages soon follow
The vast land empties
Of symbols of pride
Perseverance and posterity
Towering timber touchstones
All but gone away
Given over to monstrous concrete silos
Lined in solemn rows
Like artillery shells
STOCK TANKS & SCOOP SHOVELS
food more Cajun than Creole
but the music is funky Zydeco and loud
the joint steamy and messy and jumping
cooking in the open in the back
blackened fish in blackened skillets
deep-fried ‘gator and soft-shelled crab
fresh from the Gulf
crawfish boiled in pepper sauce
in long metal stock tanks
scoop-shoveled onto big beer trays
patrons bibbed and greasy-chinned, laughing
over supper served on hubcaps
a grinning busboy winks at our table, says
“Yeah, man, eat them motherfuckin" crawfish.”
Gregg Norman lives and writes in a lakeside cottage in Manitoba, Canada, with his wife and a small dog who runs the joint. His poetry has been placed in journals and literary magazines in Canada, USA, UK, Australia and India. He is also the author of four published novels and a novella.
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