Keeper of the Plains
Where currents of the Little Arkansas churn
into wider waters of a deeper river, he rises
in silent silhouette high above urban treetops
in singular one-dimensional weathered steel—
plumed headdress tilted backward, downward,
palms turned skyward in cosmic supplication.
His ancestral kin—Kansa South Wind People—
had once gathered grain, hunted game there.
Their fires rose in columns of smoke vanishing
into an indigenous universe—or another one.
That maternal flatland from an evaporated sea
gave full term birth to Kansas, Wichita, and me.
These days, wheat farmers scan the southwest
horizon for signs, perhaps a distant diorama
of an entire storm with silent lightning flashing
inside thunderheads. Thumbs tucked in bibbed
overalls, these modern-day keepers of the soil
search the sky for what to do on the land.
Contentious winds whip riverbank trees and sweep
across surface water. The five-ton, noble emblem
keeps secrets, both ancient and instant. He holds
in trust stories of these two rivers where once
a 1950’s teenager, a son of the city, came of age
in the turbulent confluence of passion and taboos.
Calvin Ross has contributed many stories and poems to the Class of 1960 website. Click on the underlined titles below to read some of his work.
“…that maternal flatland from an evaporated sea…” is a beautiful rendering of the usual “flat as a pancake” description. In a google search I read that the geography departments of Texas State Univ. and Arizona State Univ. used a laser microscope to measure the topography of an I-Hop pancake and compared it to the US Geologic Survey data to construct a west-to-east profile of Kansas, and they did determine that Kansas was indeed flatter than a pancake. The comparison did reveal that 13 states were also flat and that Florida is the flattest of all the states.
Calvin’s poetic vision of an “evaporated sea bed” reminded me of the sea shell fossils I hunted in South Texas, called “Turkey hearts.” And Texas is apparently flatter than Kansas. In western Kansas, my mother hunted for and collected Indian arrow heads. And all that multi state area is an “evaporated sea bed” that leaves documentation of the lives that we celebrate from that Kansas history of our people.
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