Here In Kansas / Joshua Alan Sturgill
It’s tornado season we say
in this land of camel crickets
but no camels, where junebugs
and mayflies seem unconstrained
by the calendar and honest money
is known by its stockyard smell.
Once an inland sea, the sky
is our ocean now, and the hills
are jokingly called (by folks
from more varied elevations)
God’s Golf Course. We prefer
to call the prairie Heaven’s Mirror.
I spend long hours there
adoring the tallgrass and the native trees.
And I’ve considered them
in all kinds of light — the first,
the full, the falling into gold —
but have never yet seen a blue stem
or a red bud.
Seems our names for things
always arrive from elsewhere, sterile
as any import, but
the subtle glories
these names fail to define
are our local specialty
All poetry and supplementary material: copyright 2026 by Joshua Alan Sturgill. All rights reserved.
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