Native Wit
Not for lack of native wit
Have cottonwoods prevailed
Upon prairie’s crusted skin.
Brief torrents of summer rain
Fill dry streambeds, soon
Give way to months of drought.
Crocus, tulip, pom-pom, azalea,
forsythia, redbud – they take their
chances with Spring’s early dare.
When, for blooming, nothing else
Remains – enter cottonwoods,
Hearty laggards of the plains.
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Image Credit: Ghostly branches of a cottonwood in spring [photography by Richard Schulte, San Diego, CA]
Howard F. Stein is a poet as well as an applied, psychoanalytic, medical, and organizational anthropologist, psychohistorian, and organizational consultant. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, OK, USA, where he taught for nearly 35 years. He is Poet Laureate of the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology. From 1980-1988, he was Editor of The Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology. He has published some 300 poems. He has published 32 books, of which 10 are books or chapbooks of poetry. His most recent poetry books are Presence—Poems from Ghost Ranch (2020), Centre and Circumference (2018), and Light and Shadow (2018).
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