Poetry Friday - Texas - Liz Garton Scanlon

Ten-year-old Texans spend their fourth-grade year studying the state.
Texas geography.
Texas history.
Famous Texans.

My daughter reported on one of the early Mexican explorers, made an iMovie about the mountain region, and is working on a piece about Barbara Jordan. Yesterday, this immersion in all that is huge and mythic culminated in a class trip to the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum.

It’s all a little dizzy-making for a Colorado-Wisconsin hybrid girl like me.

See, here’s the thing about about Texas.
Before it was a state, it was a nation.
And it has not forgotten that.
The battles, the oil, the cotton, the hurricanes.
The cowboys, the cities, the politicians.
Texas has a big, fat, ol’ story to tell.

Seriously. And that’s before we even mention the snakes…

Heart
by Catherine Bowman

Old fang-in-the-boot trick. Five-chambered asp. Pit organ and puff adder. Can live in any medium save ice. Charmed by the flute or the first thunderstorm in spring, drowsy heart stirs from the cistern, the hibernaculum, the wintering den of stars. Smells like the cucumber served chilled on chipped Blue Willow. Her garden of clings, sugars, snaps, and strings. Her creamy breasts we called pillows and her bird legs and fat fingers covered with diamonds from the mines in Africa. The smell of cucumber…. Her mystery roses…. Heading out Bandera to picnic and pick corn, the light so expert that for miles you can tell a turkey vulture from a hawk by the quiver in the wing.