Read an Excerpt from Commonwealth, a New Poetry Collection by D.A. Lockhart

The poetry of D.A. Lockhart has filled over a half-dozen collections and has been published widely in some of the finest journals. Now the author returns with another series of poems that are sure to captivate his readers.

Lockhart's latest, titled Commonwealth (Kegedonce Press), meditates on the history of the Lenape (a first-nation to which he is a member) and their migrations throughout the American Midwest before and after colonial powers took root on Turtle Island. The lines of these poems capture the language of the natural world, and pathways through it such as rivers, highways, and buffalo traces. They speak to the fluidity of time and space throughout history, and the stories that the Lenape collected and shared as they connected with the land that they migrated through.

These are stories of home, freedom, and dreams. And they are stories of alienation, capture, and the stark reality of a changing world. All shared in a lyrical meditation that is as deep as it is clear.

Today we have a special excerpt from Commonwealth to share with our dedicated readers. Read on to delve further into this exciting new work.

An Excerpt from Commonwealth, by D.A. Lockhart

Union Pacific North to Lake Forest

I am to be collected at Ravenswood

then

north from here,

through to where 

the water is said

to be sweetest,

the forests thick

like manicured

edges of parade

grounds. 

And the rail lines

draw on to the horizon,

maybe east,

perhaps west,

the city is a compass

unto itself. 

The way north, 

our way north

and the Union Pacific North

runs both ways hourly.

Indeed, the sun is more golden

and the brick stone station

clean like a suburban Kroger. 

And when it arrives, the crush 

    the heat

                the crush

  chases the starlings, 

but not the pigeons.

Cars of bruised aluminum call back

    unpeopled to automats

and the yellowed, thick-windowed

world slides past. Samples of middle-

American prosperity, tastes of chain

stores in craftsman storefronts. 

  and the trees

  and the cars

  and the arms 

with red light

clatter, tumble

dry past the windows, 

blur into stations

with names like forests

Winnetka, 

Hubbard Woods, 

Ravina, 

Highwood,

Lake Forest. 

An elevated train

through Sandburg’s dream upon

fragrant grasses

and verdant forests

and soft sand shores

beyond.

And the time between trains

is idle, becomes the material 

          between stanzas

    a single breath 

    in the cooling evening.

What awakens life from there

     is the dumb weight of steel upon earth

     the rush of air fleeing the arrival,

     the stale heat of a fifty-year-old engine.

As the sun comes to rest 

in the unfathomable West,

I shall wait on that south-bound

train with its fury and its hard diesel

breath, to drag me south again. 

It is impossible to know the distance

one can travel or the distances we’ve

come from. What is certain is the maps

    are all constant works in progress

    and fallible like any early draft. 

The clatter and the wallop

of the land beneath us, reads

     like the finality of a folk tune

     sung back in low-light, lives

     called back to us, as we await

     the gentle rest of sleep 

before we begin afresh at first light.

_______________________________________

D.A. Lockhart is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Devil in the Woods (Brick Books 2019) and Tukhone: Where the River Narrows and the Shores Bend (Black Moss Press 2020). His work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2019, TriQuarterly, ARC Poetry Magazine, Grain, Belt, and the Malahat Review among many. He is a Turtle Clan member of Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit (Lenape), a registered member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and currently resides at the south shore of Waawiiyaatanong (Windsor,ON-Detroit, MI) and Pelee Island.