Loblolly Marsh Psalm

Collaborative Poem by Shari Wagner’s Poetry Workshop Members, 9/5/2025

Thanks be for sawtooth sunflowers
waving cheerily as we pass by
and for purple flowers of fall
fiercely holding their own
amidst the shimmer of yellow!
Thanks be for hot sun and cool breeze,
for leafy windchimes, bluestem’s
wavering flags, lithe sway
of prairie dock, broad applause
of their leaves. Thanks be for cicadas
joining the cottonwood chorus—
old reverberations of water
rushing over stone. Thanks
for the stoop at the side of the hill
and the friend who pauses
to bow toward a chicory flower.
Praise the purgative ghosts
of prairie fires—this marsh
a palimpsest of what was
and will be. Praise the monarchs
of the wild, their flight paths
barely traceable, circling
the prairie dock, following us
back to the beginning, to the mighty
and the small, to tickseed
and sticktight—unassuming marvels
we pick off for days after.
Sing praise for turkeyfoot and sedge,
for this fertile land and the farmer
who called it, “the armpit of Indiana.”
O give thanks for his deed of sale!