This morning the wind like a train

The sky a runaway horse

Small birds being tossed like confetti

And the willows bent to their god.

We all know the old joke

If the wind ever stops

All the chickens will fall over.

We’ve all been schooled in updrafts and down.

I don’t want to hear it.

I want to hear Grandmother travels

Five hundred miles to touch my face

That Grandfather pats my back.

I want to hear I breathe what lifts hawks’ wings!

Oh, this prairie wind, how it makes my eyes water

Luffs my soul. Tell me it carries the first songs

Stories never told outside a circle of fire, tales

Only a coyote could know.

Friend, are you weary like me?

Step outside. Take the names of all the souls

Into your lungs. Hold them there

Let them go.

Charles Finn is the author of the Wild Delicate Seconds, On a Benediction of Wind (winner of the 2022 Montana Book Award), and co-editor of the textbook/anthology The Art of Revising Poetry. His forthcoming poetry collection, The Folding Chair of Now, will be published in 2025 by Chatwin Press. He lives in Havre, MT, with his wife Joyce Mphande-Finn and their two cats, Tija and Rilke.