Wisconsin Wonderland
by Peter Zelchenko November 6, 2009

(From the Party Line boiler room's old but ever-relevant lyric archive, in commemoration of the peculiarly sunny but cold days that still somehow aren't quite so cold as to annoy, in fact there is that pleasantness about them that we only experience for a brief moment in this uniquely Midwestern season, which is not to say that autumn is not celebrated the world around, but rather that the chilly, straight-road, crisp-apple flavor of it here in our prairie is something only we locals understand, isn't it, which raises a minor question of why a Chicagoan is paeanizing our autumn with a cheesehead poem, but some things simply defy explanation, and quite frankly The Bean inspires no very strong autumny feelings, and we think football tailgating is stupid, and no offense to all those cheeseheads out there...)

Wisconsin Wonderland

Autumn world, subdued and mellow
Green to brown and brown to yellow
Now the fields are falling fallow
In God's country

Lone mare in a meadow plays
Stamps her hoof, content to graze
Sun peers at her through a maze
Of bleak, gray clouds

Bitter winds the branches tease
Through the graying, fragile trees
Parched, as if some dread disease
Would make them sleep

Now, with silos overtaxed
Summer waned, autumn waxed
And exhausted fields relaxed
And died for a while

--Peter Zelchenko, 1992

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