Past Prophet’s Town on Interstate 65
Night comes on too swiftly
in the dusk that hides behind
hundreds of wind turbines,
slow red embers igniting
then fading in mechanical
waves a few hundred feet
above the perfect flat top
earth between no where
and the butcher on the lake.
As if the wind were transparent
and clean until captured
by the cutting edges of tripartite
blades and trailed out like exhaust,
pure red clay in the dying light
of day. Past the town that three
miracles couldn’t save from land
hungry squatters and mile markers
flash like deer eyes before
the first shot then vanish like fire
dances in the daydreams
of a failed western confederacy.
Through the state, name built
from the people chased out of it,
and in the static of air between
the places people wished to be
found, the radio delivers gospel
wrested away from those enticed
to traverse an ocean and settle
in a sea of prairie grass. Each
mile marker increasing the static
and the sense that the spaces
between creep outward, emptiness
starts in quashed prophecy’s
of men true to their natural world,
ends by those with the need to harvest
even the wind and turn our night
into a deep horizon of crimson
waves and the murmur of praise
sung out by those yet to leave.
D.A. Lockhart is based out of Windsor, ON. His work has appeared in or forthcoming in Contemporary Verse 2, the Mackinac, the Windsor Review, Sugar House Review, Hawk and Whipporwill, Straylight Literary Magazine, and Minor Literature[s] among others . He is a recipient of several grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council. His first poetry collection, Big Medicine to the Shore of Erie, will be released later this year by Black Moss Press. He is a member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation.