Pilgrimage with Grandchildren
by Janice Northerns
Hi, I’m Janice Northerns, coming to you from Wichita, Kansas, for Poets on Plains.
I was born and raised in Texas, but my husband and I moved to Southwest Kansas 27 years ago, where we taught English at Seward County Community College in Liberal. We moved to Wichita two summers ago.
My first poetry collection, Some Electric Hum, won several awards, and I’ve just finished a second book, a hybrid collection of poetry and essays inspired by the life of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was kidnapped at age nine by Comanches and lived with them for most of her life. I also have a new poetry chapbook, Men and Angels, coming out soon.
I am honored to share one of my own poems with you today: Pilgrimage with Grandchildren, which was published in 2023 in KANSAS!, (that’s Kansas with an exclamation mark), our state’s gorgeous travel magazine. The theme for the issue was road trips, and, as I lived in southwest Kansas at the time, my first thought was that going almost anywhere from my home in Liberal involved a drive of several hours. In other words, every trip was a road trip. My son and his family live in Wichita (so now you see how we ended up here), and the two-lane highway between Liberal and Wichita was one I travelled often. The poem I’m reading today is about one of those trips along Highway 54.
Pilgrimage with Grandchildren
The distance between them and me
is half a day on Highway 54,
a solid slog of truck-glutted,
two-lane monotony. After each visit
to southwest Kansas, the drive home
for grandkids means four hours
strapped in car seats, the only reprieve
a half-way stop in Greensburg to pee.
They know this road as well as I do,
know how I like to play beat the clock,
shaving minutes off our time:
no loitering at the gas station.
But this trip, just past Minneola,
I turn off the highway on a whim,
follow the gravel path to white giants
luring us like Sirens in a sea of grass.
The kids’ happy chatter tells me
they sense we are no longer bound
for anywhere. We have arrived
at the corner of Here and Now.
I park as close as I dare and children
spill out of the car while I check
for No Trespassing signs. Together,
we approach the glitz and gleam
of a turbine towering twice as high
as its stodgy grain elevator neighbor
just down the road. Holding hands,
we stretch as far as we can
’round the base and slowly inch
our way along. We are ants
circling a temple.
Voices lost in the roar
of pinwheeling scythes
harvesting the wind,
we are sleeves of wonder,
billowing and blown.
Used with permission
This particular trip immediately came to mind when I brainstormed ideas for a poem. When we moved to Kansas from West Texas, I thought we’d be leaving the wind behind but I was wrong. Because Southwest Kansas is flat and windy, there are a fair number of wind farms in the area, and while some people think those giant wind turbines are a blight on the landscape, I’ve always found them to be majestic. Some years ago, my husband and I took a three-year-old nephew to see one up close, and I’d always wanted my grandchildren to have that same experience. The wind farm near Mineola is visible from the highway and I’d often thought about stopping, but my desire to just “get there” usually won out.
I wanted to convey in the first part of the poem the ordinary, maybe even boring nature of a routine drive. A few stanzas in,the tone shifts as the grandkids understand we are no longer concerned with “getting there” but are now focused on the here and now. And I tried to help readers grasp the sense of awe we felt by using the word Pilgrimage in the title and describing us as “ants circling a temple.” If you haven’t seen a wind turbine up close, I highly recommend it!
Thank you for joining us for this installment of Poets on the Plains. I’m Janice Northerns, coming to you today by way of Highway 54 and Wichita, Kansas.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award from the University of Kansas, the Kansas Authors Club Nelson Poetry Book Award, anda WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up on a farm in Texas and holds degrees from Texas Tech University, where she received the Robert S. Newton Creative Writing Award. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. After living in southwest Kansas for 25 years, she and her husband moved to Wichita in 2023. She is active in the local chapter of the Kansas Authors Club and presents workshops locally and at the state level. Learn more on her website: www.janicenortherns.com
