Jersey #9: Kentucky's Journey

Okay...so I will get to the details of my Memphis trip very soon (way fun), but for now I'm busy and have mucho homework to do before practice tonight. In the meantime, I thought I'd throw some more poetry out into the world. My assignment was to write a poem about a piece of art on campus - there was one called "Breaking Front" in the English building, which featured an Iowa landscape - basically sky, corn, and some clouds - very "Iowan", probably a comfortable view of home for most of the students here...this sort of inspired me to write about my home - so here it is...


I promise to write about rugby and Memphis soon!!! Stay tuned..


Painting Home

It's a picture seen a thousand times,
Corn and sky
Corn and sky
Illuminating with each stoke
Not the colors that soak the canvas
But the missing hues of home.

How far before golden fields give way
To the dark and dusty hills of home?
How far before hollows
Become hollers
And creeks become cricks?
Before horses stand in place of cornstalks
And tobacco leaves
Sit, toxic in the sun
To be enjoyed later as a
Buzz
In the cheek or a burn in the lungs -
Where bourbon flows like water
Through veins which
Bleed as blue as the grass
Where Rupp's cathedral
Holds it's Mass

These are the colors of my life:
Greens and browns and
Wildcat Blues

Let those greens be painted over gold
And earthy browns rise up to
Shrink the vast expanding sky


Let Breaking Front frame
The lives of Others -

And I will paint my own way home.