Highways and Byways: The Drowning (Part 2)

The rest of my preamble, and the poem

By Maik Strosahl

I still remember driving on Indiana 128 on my way to a Frankton store to collect for the papers I had delivered all week. The sky was dark from an approaching storm and the winds were gaining strength.
    It had to be late July or early August, as the corn was tall and the beans were full grown, still all the dark green of summer. The gusts really did make waves through the beans and I got distracted by the thought of the beans being a real sea, filled with danger. I sat for a while in the parking lot of the now defunct Bauer’s Market, working out the language and playing with the story.
    I was proud of the poem when it was first penned, but never considered it one of my best and slowly retired the piece from readings. It was published in the Tipton Poetry Journal, Issue #6, probably around 2006 (this issue is not in the online archives and my copy is in a box somewhere, waiting to be unpacked). Over the years I forgot about that poem and during a long funk, I forgot my love for writing for a while.
    In 2015, I finally got around to visiting a group that I was supposed to be a part of from the beginning. Jenny Kalahar had moved to Elwood and was eager to start a poetry group. I received several invitations, but was mired in that funk I mentioned.
    When I finally did get to visit the Last Stanza poetry group, I found a wonderful mix of creatives who were still very welcoming and encouraging. Jenny mentioned that even though I was not in attendance from the beginning, my poem—the one below—was the first poem read at their inaugural meeting.
    Sometimes, one can feel like the words we write are just a passing mood and that no one really reads or is influenced by what we have scribbled down on paper or typed into our computers. It was really nice to know that at least one person felt for a moment the same way I did, driving down that highway, staring out at the rolling waves of a soybean field.

The Drowning

Already I had swallowed
the stories she told,
coughing on fear
of danger in those beans.

We were innocents,
crashing through the cornfields,
laughing as the bent leaves
slapped at our faces
until we reached the end
and those soybeans.
I held my brother back
from the waves.

“You could drown
in that sea of green,” I warned,
as my sister had cautioned me.
We stared into the vacant eyes
of a fallen doe,
who must not have been told
and now seemed to bob
with the choppy prairie winds.

Our first brush with death,
I just stood—
eyes locked, feet planted,
an arm around my little brother,
who cried that day
on the cornstalk shore.

Copyright © 2022 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there.