A Rumor of Coyotes – web home of author Cheryl Unruh
WILD HORIZON
"Wild Horizon," oil painting by Anna Patricia Keller WILD HORIZON Inspired by “Wild Horizon,” oil painting by Anna Patricia Keller There’s a rugged line in the west today, a brown-black row of clouds that hovers, curling into itself like waves with white caps on...
THAT SUMMER, a poem…
THAT SUMMER In the decade before I was born, everyone was a Betty or a Beverly, or a Mary Lou, and their hair was flipped up and the skirts were poodles. But when I was young, it was Sunday and it was Easter, and it was the ‘60s, and I wore a new dress that my my...
AT THE EDGE
AT THE EDGE My friend Dan lives at the edge of the earth, two blocks from the ocean. If he looks past the diving gulls and breaking waves, he may see Hawaii way out there, floating peacefully in the Pacific. Dan spends his days writing fiction, telling the...
In the Company of My Tribe
IN THE COMPANY OF MY TRIBE Today, a friend of mine, Michael Graves, spoke at the Kansas Book Festival. At the festival he received a 2016 Kansas Notable Book Award for his book “To Leave a Shadow,” which is a fun read, a detective novel set in 1937 Wichita. His talk...
Souvenir
SOUVENIR Take me back to that night back to the river - with its sleek stones for skipping across the water, summer trees reaching bank to bank, and me, a teenager then, sitting on the sandbar beneath someone else’s stars. I did not belong there that...
Every Breath You Take
EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE He rationed his lines of breath, slowed them down almost to zero. It wasn’t so much a conscious action but he saw it happen, felt his body caving in - in slow motion. The phone call about her death syphoned his lungs, collapsed his trachea...
The Value of a Writing Buddy
Every night for the 30 days in November, 2009, I received an email from my friend, Tracy Million Simmons, a fellow writer. She’d tell me how many words she’d written that day. And she might throw in a mention about a character or how her plot was moving, or how she...
Writing Exercise – a To-Do List Poem
Love of words, love of language is one of the main reasons I write. For me, it’s so much fun to create imagery that is fresh and new. Because beautiful imagery is a thing that inspires me, when I find my writing energy lacking, I’ve learned to go back to my...
A Rumor of Coyotes
Hello, People of the World! Cheryl Unruh here. Welcome to my new blog! I’m really excited to have a new space to spill words onto! A clean new site! I’ll be covering several main topics here. For one thing, I’ll be talking about the writing process - sharing...
Sunlight
SUNLIGHT You stand against the sky, today a springtime blue. Golden sunlight sparkles in your hair. That ray of sun, sent to Earth, raced through the galaxy at the speed of light. It landed here. It landed on you. ~ Cheryl...
The landscape is one hill folding into another, bodies of hills lying together. There are few trees for shade. We make our own shadows here, unless a cloud runs interference with the sun.
As a hawk glides overhead, we feel the rhythms of land and sky. And somewhere out here, we step into that space between questions and answers, a place where we are satisfied with the unknown.
After darkness comes, the wind settles down, and the Milky Way flings itself across the sky. A rumor of coyotes hangs in the night air.
When the world closes up shop, when the sky turns from blue to black for the very last time, when the last poem is written and read, this is where I want to be – out in my beloved Flint Hills.
– excerpt from “At Home in the Flint Hills,” Waiting on the Sky by Cheryl Unruh ©2013