Prairie: Giants in the Earth

From Prairie Suite: A Celebration. Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center. 2006.

Have we listened long enough to the chattering machine,
can we redeem our losses, redirect back to timelessness?

Time was: a great plain plumed with grass,
now all but gone by way of the steel plow,
first in a lineage that frayed an ecosystem,
fumbling downward one row at a time
into dense and fibrous roots, these soils made fertile
by a massive underground biomass.

Can we now attempt to learn, appreciate the unsullied breeze
above this survivor, ever hope to be as well-sustained?

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