So just about the time I wrote "Homecoming," forty years ago and more, this little poem came out in the literary magazine of the college where I was teaching. I had nothing to do with the choice or the magazine, but I saw the name and did a little inquiry. Bonnie Kuipers was from South Dakota, and, in all likelihood, a descendant of Albertus.
Her DNA wouldn't have been enough to prompt me to put this poem into the book--with the story; but its subject matter is really somehow related. I won't try to interpret the thing and tell you what Ms. Kuipers is thinking exactly, but there is something of the same love/hate thing going on here--and that prairie wind marks it plainly as the work of someone whose grown up in it.
I asked her for the poem--she was 20 years old back then, I'm sure, no more--and she sweetly accepted.
Wherever she is, and if she hasn't forgotten, she knows that story. I think that perhaps I told some other Kuipers descendants long ago too. But I don't know that anyone else in the world knows that the poem I used almost as an intro to the story I've been telling was written by the prototype of Albertus DeKruyf, the man who decides, for his own reasons, not to move himself or his people to the land of milk and honey, to stay instead in Dakota.
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Going Back
When we came back
no one had lived there
since '45--
and you looked
like a woman out of time,
broken, used,
gone past your prime.
I knew you had been waiting.
You'd been too long
with the sun and rain
and those infernal prairie winds--
scarred where they'd beat you
but still smiling--
how much of a lover
could you expend the wind to be?
You're tired of the talk
that has run about you--
some have forgotten you
years ago and some can
never forget what you
used to be--
You'll finallly die
burdened by memories
and relics of the dead and gone,
You'll creak and collapse
in a gentle way--
in slow decay,
as a woman going down
caressed by her lover--
still smiling at the wind.
--Bonnie Kuipers
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