Yesterday I had the pleasure of getting acquainted with my second cousin Michael Mengis.  He reminded me of my grandfather, Michael's and my children's great grandfather whom they never knew... Ezra Inlow was a farmer and a blacksmith in Pine Ridge, Arkansas.  It was the way Michael put words together more than the way he looks. 

We say we love the earth and try to prove we do

by taking pictures of hummingbirds and whooping cranes

and writing poems about vanishing rain forests.

I doubt we know the land the way my grandfather did.

I remember how he tilled the river bottom

walking freshly turned furrows

behind his team of mules and plow.

He knew how much they were the same,

he, the mules and the land.