Riding With Ronda (With Love): Everyday Magic, Day 1,114

Ronda reading at the 2014 Power of Words conference. Photo by Stephen Locke.

When Ronda's son Scott called me Monday with the news of her death, I couldn't believe it -- I still can't and may never be able to believe it -- but I also knew the only way to start to circle the bonfire of this loss was through poetry. After all, that's how Ronda and I rolled and rode. She was my first mate in many of the events spanning Kansas during my poet laureate years (2009-2013), and I knew I could trust her and that I absolutely loved her from early on.

She organized Power of Words conferences with me and so many other events for our community -- the annual William Stafford reading, the Poetry Festival, many Kansas Authors Club conferences and workshops with kids going through hell, and so much more. In everything, she embodied courage, grace, hospitality, and sly humor.

Here is a poem I wrote a few hours after I heard the news. It's about some of our many adventures although she is on an adventure how that defies me buying some iced tea and bag of Cheetos to join her. May she rest, write, and ride in peace, beauty, and love.

Riding With Ronda

“Now I know your secret forever,” you said

as I drove 80 mph with orange fingers

and salty tongue from all those Cheetos

we shared, giggling in a conspiracy of poets,

a murder of young crows bent on growing old,

a fast-moving murmuration of words.

It was the trip after the trip when you made me

stand on a table in a sandwich shop at high lunch

in Salina, Kansas and recite a poem I couldn’t

remember so I had to make up most of it.

The trip before that trip you had us springing

ourselves on unsuspecting and highly irritated

quiche-eaters in Dodge City because we were

supposed to read poetry and no one showed up.

“Stand on the threshold and shout out your poem,”

you instructed us as Kansans sipping lemonade

tried so hard not to make eye contact or,

as politely as they could, ask us to stop.

This was before we got lost past the end

of the world near Ulysses, but found the wind

that’s bred for fight out there as we bundled

our pillows and bags to the edge-of-town motel,

which was months before the trip to St. Francis,

where you grew up, when we met Grandma Barb,

your elegantly-coiffed old teacher, for the best

fried chicken in this dimension in a gas station.

Was that after or before you told me new curves

of your own unlikely story that landed you here,

against the odds and with the gods of fire, trepidation,

and the saving grace of poetry so that you could speak

your poems loud enough to drown out the cicadas

in that 100-degree bandstand in the park before

we went to the cinderblock motel with the sign

that made me laugh until we cried in shock:

“Hunters, please use plastic bags on the beds

before you dress your venison.”

We were always traveling, even in our own town,

losing track of just how much French toast

we ate at Milton’s, the Roost while puzzling through

the unlikely survival of the ones we love best,

including ourselves, delighting in each other’s

children as well as the stranger who loved poetry,

the books forged out of impossible dread

and the love that lifts you up through that dread

and carries you here, a hospital bed in what was

once an Airbnb living room, your dog on your lap,

then so far north of our town, surely festooned

with blue Christmas lights, even deep in the woods,

where somehow you crossed into a place we can’t

fathom, accept, or follow despite how much

you wanted to live, how deeply

we all love you, loved you, love you.