By Bob Elmendorf
I’ve never seen the prairie. It must start
soon out of Buffalo, the farthest I’ve been west,
under whose streets Lake Erie, sharing shores
with Canada, flattens its sheet.
Wagons with furniture rattled west,
and secretaries were set out by the trail
mile after mile.
The night after mom died, I opened
a packet of my poems from her desk.
She’d written: “Brilliant” “Sad but beautiful”
There’s Ohio, but I cannot think what’s next.
Bob Elmendorf has been published in 37 magazines and has four poems appearing in the current issue of Little Star. He gives a reading every few years and was a member of poetry workshops for twenty years. He has been teaching Vergil, Catullus, Ovid, and Horace pro bono to 15 to 20 home school teens the last 12 years, and a little bit of Sappho.
