Mornings in March

To celebrate National Poetry Month, and my design overhaul of the ol blog here, I am posting some of my old poems this week. Some of these are from this year, others from as far away and long ago as high school. I don't claim to be a very good poet, but sometimes words can do what even drawing, painting, and photography can't. Here is my humble offering. Maybe you can relate to some of them. I call this section "Max Nix," German for "nothin' much," or a "whole lot of nothing." Enjoy.

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In the mornings
in March
as I walk from my truck to my classroom door
I hear geese calling
and sometimes cattle braying

if it's not too cold and the breeze is from the South
I catch a faint scent of the cattle auction yard across town

I close my eyes and reach for the school door
and I can feel the dew
and smell the earth
and the grass feebly trying to come back to life after months of death under inches of ice and snow

And I wonder how it would sound to hear Garrison Keillor reading these words on his Writers' Almanack

but these words aren't the poem
the moment is the poem,
the geese and the cows and the prairie air

I'm not the poet, God is
and I thank Him for letting me live in Iowa
and work at a small school
in a small town
and live in an even smaller one

and I thank Him for the poem of the morning