Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve

 

The coven of bison
          brought here as wishes
                    bore 80 million calves
                              in a year

                              This was the epicenter of the nursery
                              of the palace of the monument
                              of the battlefield
of the resurrection of the biome—

170 million acres aggressively
                                      self-returfing &
            a new state slogan:

                        AD ASTRA
                        THE TALL GRASS
                                 PER ASPERA
                                 ITS REVENGE

The public-private partnership1
          was lesser prairie chickens & very large cats.

Even the sky could hear the wolves returning.
The grasshoppers were strategists. 
The Koch brothers melted plows.

 

1 After decades of contention between park advocates and local agribusiness activists, in 1996 a unique public-private partnership was formed to create a tallgrass prairie preserve in Kansas on one of the few undisturbed patches of tallgrass prairie left in North America. In less than a decade, the park fell onto hard times as the private wing of the mostly private public-private partnership could no longer financially sustain it. The preserve looked like it was going to have to be sold. Then the Nature Conservatory, led by a former managing director of Goldman Sachs and assisted by a $1 million dollar gift from Wichita's Koch brothers, took over. They introduced thirteen bison to the Kansas prairie to unexpected results. The bison quickly returned to their pre-Columbian population. After a controlled burn of the entire great plains in the spring of 2019, the tall grass prairie ecosystem of the U.S. restored itself from tap roots that had lain dormant at the earth’s core since John Deere invented the steel plow in 1838. The interior U.S. radically depopulated as prairie dog colonies caused irreparable damage to the infrastructure of its cities and towns.

Credit

Copyright © 2016 by Anne Boyer. This poem was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Imagine Your Parks grant.

About this Poem

"I was once a little girl in Kansas, and my mother pointed me toward every bison wallow she saw. Wallows are dents written in the fields by the bison’s bodies, and in that now bisonless land, a wallow was a language made of two words: 'We were.' Any thought of the prairie’s former vastness has always met in me a feeling of a proportionately vast grief. No matter how much my being from the prairie is a result of the same particular history, the tall grass prairie and its native peoples’ near total evisceration under settler colonialism and extractivist capitalism still breaks my heart. But I could mourn, or I could imagine, so I erred toward possibility, wrote a poem as a dream of the biome’s revenge. The tall grass prairie was once itself for its magnitude, just how any other ocean is oceanic for its disorienting size. Now reduced to specimen, what’s left is mostly memorial, but like any other biome the prairie is in no way inert. Why should we mistake it for defeated? Why shouldn’t it rise again? One time when I was at a rodeo, the announcer asked, 'Who here is cheering for the bulls?' Half the crowd roared. I am probably always in the-cheering-for-the-animal half of our species, so I went with it. It is easy to mistake a wallow for a tombstone, but on the day I wrote this poem, I decided to invite, instead, the optic of exquisite threat."
—Anne Boyer