In the Badlands

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley


This eastern white woman has fallen in love with the badlands
And I wonder what to do with this love
I don’t plant, or drill, or ride; I can’t herd or foretell the weather
My botany skills are rudimentary, my knowledge of medicinal plants mostly gleaned online

I can show you why the cottonwood whispers
And point out yellow rubber rabbitbrush and brick-red clinker topping a butte
I know that prairie dogs have one yip for a person and another for one holding a gun
Or so I’m told
I can tell you the average weight of a bison bull, a cow and a calf
And that’s about the extent of it

Yet with no useful skills or knowledge
I stand here under a trembling cottonwood with my heart as wide as this canyon
With so much badlands love it stretches across the canyon to the Great Plains
And feels as ancient as a petrified forest
This broken land-loving heart goes on breaking
For the losses of the Lakota, the Hidatsa, the Arikara and the Mandan
For the old mako sica

If love alone is enough, I will sit down on these colored stones of the Little Missouri shore 
And just love these buttes and bluffs
With a peculiar late in life fondness I could never explain
Or even fathom


* * * * *

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.