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Daniel's avatar

Great poem! Looking forward to the Praise Song for the People readings later this month. Sounds like a fun event.

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Chera Hammons's avatar

Thank you! It should be excellent. We'll have Amanda Johnston there, some well-known local poets, and two poets driving up from Lubbock. I'm hoping there will be a good crowd for them since they're coming all this way. Really looking forward to it!

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Jason Boyett's avatar

"Strange to think that something which grows

with such tenacity

exists for the purpose of detaching,

rolling to the wind's whim."

This is excellent.

In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan described the Russian-German immigrants who ended up in the High Plains in the 1800s. They sewed the seeds of red wheat into their vest pockets, intending to plant the wheat here. Which they did, and it thrived. But those collections included stray seeds that became invasive plants known as "perekati-pole" in their language, which translates into ”roll-across-the-field.” Russian Thistle.

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Chera Hammons's avatar

Thank you so much, Jason! And thank you for sharing this excellent info, too. That's such a great book, and one I think everyone in No Man's Land should read at least once, to understand where we're from and what we have to lose. I enjoy that about tumbleweeds, too, because it is exactly within their character to stow away. It would be hard to imagine this place without them now.

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