Category Archives: poetry

EQUINOX

Posted on September 20, 2024 by John | 1 comment


It sounds like a drug
for the infirmed
or a dressing for horses’ hooves

or a government program
to keep poverty alive
and consuming—

it sounds soothing
to the summer-baked subconscious,
a galactic reprieve

before the leaves rain 
in gusts 
before the first storm

stirs weathered flesh.
Autumnal Equinox
just rolls off the tongue.

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Posted in Photographs, Poems 2024, poetry, Ranch Journal

Tagged autumnal equinox, photography, poetry

MATERNITY

Posted on September 14, 2024 by John | Leave a comment


Dilated and making bag,
first-calf heifers choose to graze, 
closer to our familiar voices

over morning coffee. Perhaps security,
or our loving pride they feel
long distance as we imagine

a pasture full of calves clinging
to a mother’s shadow, the buck and run
as they get older like the thirty years

before them. We begin another season
of grass with rain, with feeding hay
ready to face the future with them.

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Okie Poet 2

Posted on September 9, 2024 by John | 10 comments

Wilma submitted poems to Dry Crik Review on her typical scraps of paper most of which I published. One, however, I did not publish because I could not decipher one word in the poem from her handwriting. I scanned it to Betty Blanks, who has recently authored a book “Pick Up Your Pen And Write: The Life of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel” http://wilmaelizabethmcdaniel.com, to help me out. The word was ‘ping’. Til now, this amusing poem has never seen the light of day.

FAKE FORTY-NINER

We knew Ardell
had been acting crazy	
	for weeks
he grew a beard
stalked around
muttering to himself

I gotta go now
to Jackass Hill
to Poker Flat
and Angels Camp

I gotta pan some gold
race me some frogs
kiss me some CanCan girls
I really gotta go

He drove away in his Pinto
with the ping
towards the motherlode
on Golden Chain Highway 49

We didn’t hear from him
until his bonanza petered out
	he phoned collect
the Pinto gave up in Jamestown

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Posted in Photographs, poetry

Tagged poetry, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel

MY DROUGHT

Posted on September 1, 2024 by John | Leave a comment

           a gusher of poems
           that poured out of the house
           on Highland Street
           and watered the town
	         - Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel (“The Gusher”)


They fall from the sky
like hawks at play
and dive into our poetry,

perfect words 
we cannot claim, but do—
to hunt the periphery

for a place to light
to transform a poem
into something better.

I am reading Wilma
in Tulare next Saturday—
revisiting her real Okie poetry,

searching for the one
that breaks my drought
into a flood of verses,

a gusher of poems
that poured out of the house
on Highland Street
and watered the town