Dakota Rain

Dakota Rain


North Dakota shivers with demographic erosion

lactic notions homesteaders delivered

to the plains and frozen acreage

expecting rain and frozen prosperity to follow

the plow


once teeming settlements across the Midwest

expanse, grassland economics demarcating

an 1880’s promise

to sow hope for a new generation of Euro natives

imprinting the flow of bison and wild mint footprints

across the land that forsook them


1908 brought gusts of despair to desperate ironworkers

and despondent farmers who watched their extemporal

settlements succumb to wet depression

and evaporating grains

the railroads threaded throughout the North Dakotan canvass

painted yellow buttercups and a thriving trade

to a doomed bottomland of patriotic conversions


Norwegian and German learners of the American way

on the high plains and snowy valleys

the dust storms devoured what the rain left behind

and worse, non sequiturs – precipitating

consistent torchings of holy edifices

sometimes abandoned, like many practitioners

of the word


decayed schoolhouses and empty grain elevators

frame the countryside now, void of knowledge

and common courtesy

for the seeds of tomorrow


ghosts and galvanized wringers

loneliness and third generation ruin


wall-less farms and homeless cattle

dismembered dolls and constant funerals


frozen wheat and basement nooses

dead badgers and gutted Fords


the North Dakotan expanse is rife

with indescribable beauty, unmoved

by a shifting economy and barren wasteland


waiting…

…for rain.