Where
I Live
by Pat
Underwood
This is Michael Carey for Voices from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s poet is Pat Underwood who lives up the winding lanes of the wooded hills outside Colfax Iowa. Her back porch looks out far into the distance of Iowa’s beautiful landscape. In this poem she lets that huge landscape shrink her so that no coming freeze or hunters guns can harm her, or the soul she feels floating in the air. It’s a beautiful love poem to a beautiful place.
Where I Live
Here surrounded by woods,
one flake of snow offers no stability.
Like viewing an artist’s canvas,
enough brush marks force the onlooker
to see the fur of hoarfrost
as it clings windward
to the oak’s snowy stem.
I am small as I travel these white-painted hills.
I know the secret caves
of molting owls,
the great openings of mines deer avoid,
where the nuthatch turn bellies
skyward in simple ease.
Even in the cold,
jays breasted in soot
are warm enough here, fluttering
like leaves in trees
before they hear
the pierced chill of hunter’s shots
to soar north in strokes
blue as arrows;
souls floating in a sunlit tide of air.
"Where I Live"
by Pat Underwood was originally published in the Opus Literary Review.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.
Biography
Pat Underwood lives with her husband Steve along the North Skunk River in a former mining area outside Colfax, Iowa. Her work has recently appeared in Poet & Critic, Opus Literary Review, Voices International, The Briar Cliff Review, Lyrical Iowa, Poetic Page and River King. She has won awards in poetry from Iowa Woman, Writers’ Digest and NFSPS.