Page 62 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

Sandhill cranes in migration, Teton Range, Wyoming

Notes:

This poem was written in response to paintings in the collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art

in Jackson, Wyoming. I was one of two poets who organized a public reading of ekphrasis – poems

responding to art – in 2009. In looking at the many pictures displayed in the museum’s gallery, I was

drawn to those that felt like eulogies for what was lost and I wrote about the deep grief they brought

out in me. This poem was informed not only by a painting by John James Audubon, but by several trips

I took with my husband to North Dakota. The last time we went, we saw one whooping crane among

hundreds of sandhills, the only wild whooper I have ever seen.