There's a bend in the road tennis ball throwing distance
from our front door. The city put a sign there,
warning you not to drop trash, a message I thought
unnecessary for neighbors like mine.

Sometimes someone mows this field bordered by 
overgrown trees & a brackish creek. Walk through
the undergrowth, and you can see evidence
of child's play & teenage weekend nights, the natural
detritus of suburban rituals of near-freedom, of wildness
within their aquarium, so far from the open waters
of their adulthood.

Walk far enough back into that postage stamp
of the wild, and you can almost see what it was.
A flat low kind of prairie. 

Recently, we got snow -- a rarity here. I bundled up,
eager to see the blanketed field. Two steps past
the city sign, my foot fell on a twig pillowed 
beneath the snow. 

With its snap, four coyotes stood as one,
eyed me, and loped off through the high brown grass.

Written in community with VerseLove, a group of mostly educators writing a poem every day of April (National Poetry Month). The prompt for today: Write a poem about a landscape of your life.