Prairie Girl

That slip of a girl
with the long blonde hair
and huge blue eyes,
with a thirst for life
bigger than the horizon,
she plunged into life
before she was full-grown.

 She walked into the dancehall,
sweet sixteen,
and the sax player
jumped over the piano
to come and claim her.

He wooed and won her,
set their journey rolling,
a bumpy ride to places
she could never have imagined
those dreaming nights
when she was just a young girl
braving the prairie's winter winds.

All her life,
through all the pathways
that they traveled,
that prairie wind
was still singing
through her bones.
The prairie grasses danced
under the sun
in memory,
and that wide blue prairie sky
that had
beckoned her forward
in her unfinished childhood
with its limitless horizon,
turned into a mountain landscape
that never, really, ever
felt like home.