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