Tag Archives: Ken Hada

Bloodroot: Indiana Poems

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The Good Honest Ache: A Tribute to Norbert Krapf’s Bloodroot: Indiana Poems

How is it possible that we have the same
childhood seeping into our later years?

Your Indiana with its rural charms,
people storied in community, the farms
with all that good honest ache of a simpler
time pushed you to a life of poetry
and a clamoring for jazz, for blues,
for motion, as if you had to dig
up those roots that stubbornly pull you
back, that common home re-emerging
in your thoughts in unexpected hours.

Your calypso is grounded in windmills
and pastures and checkered tablecloths
where immigrant women cook the Old
Country, where men, like children, bow
their heads to say grace with hope
for a future floating in the wind.

The Indiana Poet speaks his boyhood
to a wider world – to folks who’ve never
seen a combine clicking in harvest
or a hay-wagon creaking toward a red
barn or perfect rows of endless corn
framed by walnut-treed woods, who know
little of German farm families settling
the Midwest where boys bicycled
dirt roads, cat-fished in muddy creeks,
shirts and sheets clotheslined in morning
breeze – every place has its poetry.

Like rabbit skinning or hog butchering,
the blood of our knowing is buried
in the ritual of memory – in the going
away and in the returning – memory
cannot fail those who listen to quail
calling, who contemplate flowering
dogwoods or willows weeping in dusk.

Response by Ken Hada

Norbert Krapf. Bloodroot: Indiana Poems. Photographs by David Pierini. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Quarry Books, an imprint of Indiana UP, 2008. ISBN 978-0-253-35224-8

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Persimmon Sunday

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I find them beneath my persimmon tree.

They quickly turn to go though
I don’t feel the heart to be rough with them.
Fences are necessary, I suppose.
They can be meddlesome too.

These gentle folks pass every Sunday
to visit their boy in prison, they
only want to make a pie. I only want
to be asked first – a fence divides us.

She promises to bring me tarts
and that seems fair, and I think about
fairness and their son these days.
I am glad they go see him Sundays

and I tell them so. Their calm, courtesy
strikes me. Persimmon pie is part of her
autumn ritual, something I cannot deny
her. I don’t know, don’t need to know

how it is they got off the main road.
They are seeking the sweetness that comes
after the bitterness has ripened.
Standing under a tree none of us made

I see her boy back home years ago
hungrily eating a piece of pie. I see
her husband proud, happy, the gleam
in her eye, sweet sticky juice sliding

down the boy’s dimpled cheeks,
dark eyes aglow as he wipes his mouth
with the sleeve of a flannel shirt
and I want it to be that way again,

want sour taste expunged. Afternoon
gathers and we talk about a hard,
killing frost that makes the sweetness,
a cold harsh night that ripens

this rustic fruit. We shake hands
and I don’t look back as I return
through fields where yellow leaves,
orange, dusty, scarlet and intense

lay about me, toss around me
in the breeze that carries ladybugs
unsuspecting toward their graves,
timber standing in reverent silence

as before a judge, as if to judge.
Truly autumn is the most dramatic
of days. It is a time to remember
but it is also a time to console.

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September

… seeping through cracks
of summer like light
in the barn – dust beams
suspended from ground
to hay loft and beyond –
zones of maze dazzled
children zig through
waving arms, exalting,
pretending – those old
games never get old – I
don’t want to lose
the pixie of September …

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For a Walnut Tree

Taken down

Life flowing all through your limbs
little boys trying to be men

with chainsaws conquer a peaceful giant.

Like most friends you gave and required little
of us who benefited from your shade, your security,
your beauty.

They could not stand your beauty – it reminds them
of what they are not.

I wish they had even a teaspoon of grace – enough
to let living trees flourish. Can’t we settle for a tiny
compromise: leave trees alone – go your chronic way,
pat your puny self on the back and save chainsaws
for emergencies.

Pity the boy who sharpens his heart
with a machine.

I would like to walk away and leave sawboys
to their bloodlust, but destroying trees
destroys us all – the shared life is the only life
we have – otherwise we are only broken limbs
cut off from our roots worthy of little except microbes
that refuse to yield – we are made for worms – this
I learned sitting in the shade of a walnut tree
sixty feet high and growing.

Murder, by any other name, is murder.
To our shame, the boy who kills thrives
in our consumptive society.

I am of two minds: part of me wants his saw
to splinter in process, the vengeance
of wounded wood stake him to the ground
as a horde of angry walnuts thunder down
beating him, torturing him senseless.

Revenge is sweet.

But revenge never satisfies, and even when death
comes without justification, at least the memory
of living well, hard and upright in the joy of life
remains – this I learned sitting in the shade
of a walnut tree sixty feet high and growing.

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Pine Cones

It could be that morning rain
drops covering a brave bird
chirping in the walnut tree
next door are reason enough
to celebrate a closeness felt.

Thunder and light and passing time
are nothing if not minstrels
dancing before a king and all
the paupers count themselves
fortunate to pause their duties
and glimpse into the great hall
where even royalty bows to song.

It could be that sand and surf
and mountain pines trailing
toward happiness are the strings
plucked by the lucky few
who crave awareness, peace
found in pine cones fallen.

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The Coyote in All of Us

for Taylor Hada

The moon shivers in feral sky.
Cries of coyotes echo
in the void, pierce the silence

between a canyon and forever.
Shrill voices slice the dark
and the light in chilling fragments,

remind me of the pain
I thought I had forgotten,
the betrayal of a prairie moon.

If I told you my grandpa
as a young man
had a coyote for a pet

you might not believe me
but I have an old, sepia photo
of a young man crouching

beside a wild dog, each
wary of the other, both
seem surprised to be so close.

I have also been told
Grandpa used to run down
Jack Rabbits on foot.

This wild night,
This wild night
yammering beneath timeless stars

I shudder to contemplate
that which precedes me.
The coyote in all of us.

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Cheese at Midnight

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I won’t sanctify it
by comparing the body
and blood of Christ
to processed curds
in a plastic package

but when the dragon
prevents sleep
few things comfort
like this profane element
molding in the fridge.

On such nights
I’d trade the moon
for a chunk of cheese.

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The Weight of Your Loss

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Something cruel
in not saying Goodbye . . .

fog on the mountains,
drizzle on the windshield, a buzzard
between covered peaks dark and
beautiful from this distance floats
invisible currents, a secret passage
as close as the imagination above
leafless timber dripping gray . . .

Just about everyone deserves
Goodbye eye to eye – a mirror
for the sake of conscience . . .

don’t ambush me by stealing
away in the dark leaving me to carry
the weight of your loss . . .

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Worship Hour

In Lakeview Texas (population
152 and no lake in sight)
bare stalks line harvested cotton
fields in soil colored sienna

surrounding deserted homesteads,
windmills and irrigation pipes
across fields, giant green
tractors on guard, tattered cotton

scraps float along ditches.
Three pickups wait at the door
of the Baptist Church, a
handful gathered for God.

A picture of Jesus hangs
behind the pulpit in a sanctuary
where crowds once gathered
when cotton was picked by hand.

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The Bluff

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The field next to the house
ends eighty feet above the creek.

A soft red bank
was the end of our world.
A misstep and our fall
would not be survivable.

The edge attracted us.

We would stand as close
as possible looking across infinite
prairie, breathing wild air,
follow a hawk circling
at eye level, feel wind
in our teary eyes.

Quietly we would wait
and watch and congratulate
ourselves on not falling,
grateful the tricky earth
had not given way
beneath our feet.

Satisfied
with another successful venture,
at the right moment
we would turn our backs away
from the great gulf
of our childhood
and walk home
down a dusty trail
that has yet to be improved.

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