"When dawn spreads its paintbrush on the plain, spilling purple... ," Sons of the Pioneers theme for TV show "Wagon Train." Dawn on the mythic Santa Fe Trail, New Mexico, looking toward Raton from Cimarron. -- Clarkphoto. A curmudgeon artist's musings melding metaphors and journalism, for readers in more than 150 countries.

Friday, December 28, 2018

Winter sets in...season of poetry

Great Plains Winter, December #watercolor 28 of 31
Now comes the cold season, as winter sets in.
When you grow up on the Great Plains, where the skies are as vast as the landscape, stretching beyond imagination, with so few people, it's easy perhaps to be alone.
But not so because you treasure people more. Sparse population makes encountering other people "an event," writes my favorite author John McPhee writes about traveling in Alaska in his new book The Patch.
The Plains, and winter, and people, become poetry.
My blog friend and poet Kay Lawson Gilbert in Pennsylvania wrote this poem a few years ago, inspired by one of my cabin scenes,

"Out on the plains,
       the snow piled up.
       But inside the cabin,
       the two were warm...
       words were their clothes -
       their bodies a language
        of poetry and prose."

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