✨ Graduation

silver coins...

Graduation

[1994]

Bless the Iowa River, accepting without complaint
the watermelon, strawberries, half gallon of honey,
the cantaloupe halves listing seeds.

Bless the bridge swallows arcing without colliding
through pillars every dusk. Bless the snow days
throughout the long winter afterwards,

substitute teaching, the counties phoning in
on the radio by district: Mid-Prairie, Mount Vernon,
West Liberty, West Branch. Bless the secondhand

armchair, worn lion-gold velveteen, a book
off the bargain table from Prairie Lights. Bless
the charts of the Famous you’re handed without names

when you walk in the door. Bless the shock
of recognition, Plutonian clarity, Marilyn Monroe’s
planets, the familiar in a new landscape,

as when, as a Midwest Bride floating in Fiji
above divers for the first time, silver coins
of escaped air mingled with your hair

like the currency of corn filling silos.
Bring your face to the cerulean surface.
Allow your body to float.

You brought fruit to the river.
What will you bring to the sea?

—Tania Pryputniewicz

From The Fool in the Corn, Saddle Road Press, Copyright © 2022. Used by permission of Tania Pryputniewicz. Photo by Leighann Blackwood, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.