4.30.2025
GRASSHOPPERS
Field after field of corn, stunted, earless, stripped of leaves; for what the sun left, the grasshoppers took, the President said on the radio a month after gazing out from the caboose of the Northern Pacific Special. That man has no idea, Gramma Dag said. She meant no disrespect. She meant how the cows stood dazed in the burnt stubble like stranded travelers dropped off to catch a bus that wasn’t coming. How we thought it was a black dust thunderhead till we caught the shimmer of a million wings.
NOTES
Welcome, new subscribers, and thank you. From time to time I will be dipping into the archive and reposting some poems you probably haven’t seen. This one first ran on January 25, 2023.
This is an ekphrastic poem, that is, a poem based on another work of art. The work in question, Pamm Hanson’s untitled painting, is itself an ekphrastic work, based as it is on a photograph.
Oh that thundercloud that turns into the ominous shimmer of a million wings at the end!
Just the other day we were talking about plagues of locusts. How closely the descriptions in Laura Ingalls Wilder's On the Banks of Plum Creek matches the one in the book of Joel. We also discovered that the grasshoppers that Laura described were the now-extinct Rocky Mountain locust. I will add this poem to my store of locust lore.
I also love the description of the dazed cows like stranded travelers. I see them with the frowning face of the girl in the painting.
OOOOOO! I remember this one. I remember the portrait. I remember the thundercloud turning into the shimmer of a million wings! I remember the cornfields, and the "meant no disrespect." Wow, poems live! Long live the artist and the poet!!!