Deracinated

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley


Coverage of the queen’s funeral procession
Blares across my room at the Badlands Motel
The coffin with crown atop moving slowly through the somber London crowd
 
A teddy bear in cowboy hat and buckskin coat
Perches beside a note on the motel room dresser:
For sale at the front desk

In the Dakotas to lead a tour of clinker-crowned buttes
And cottonwood canyons
I’m a gawking easterner bringing more of my kind to the badlands

Like TR, who came to shoot a bison,
Stuck around, became a rancher and a conservationist
I must have my reasons and convictions too

Yet those are unclear to me now, as the queen’s procession drags on
And I drag my feet departing the motel for the national park
Where I must study up on flora and fauna before the big bus arrives

I am feeling deracinated and aren’t we all somehow?
Detached from tribe and place
Or else confined like bison roaming only as far as park fencing

What was once the Lakota’s mako sica
And then the wild west no longer breaks an open plain
What is home or horizon to any of us now?


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Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a naturalist and award-winning author of seven nature books, including City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island and The Joy of Forest Bathing. Writing in a Woman’s Voice has featured several of her poems during 2022, including “How to Silence a Woman,” which won the February Moon Prize. Melanie has spent the past year exploring and adoring the Potomac River Gorge, New Hampshire’s White Mountains and the North Dakota badlands.