Texas Windmills

Laurence Musgrove Laurence Musgrove

Talk to Me

Robert Allen

February 2, 2025

I know exactly why I fell in love.

The sound of your voice entranced my young ear

and I loved listening. Over the phone, late

at night—remember what we talked about?

I don’t, anymore. There’s a squeaking sound

a windmill makes, like the one on the farm

where Dad was raised. A big round water tank

stood next to it, and the blades of its fan

were always turning, always producing

that distinctive noise as it powered the pump

that sucked the water up, a sound both strange

and familiar, echoing like your voice,

though now I suppose I’ve offended you

again, and sadly not for the last time.

Sometimes I wish you’d tell me a story.

Maybe you’ve always told fabulous tales

and as you say, either I don’t listen

or I hear them only selectively.

Okay, then. Don’t talk to me. We’ll just keep

doing what we’ve been doing: I will pen

my bad love poem and you will crochet

a Santa’s load of afghans—or we could

taste the air and see which way the wind blows.


Robert Allen lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, two cats, and five antique clocks. His poems have appeared in Voices de la Luna, Texas Poetry Calendar, di-verse-city, and TPA. He loves cardio-boxing, hates throwing things away, and facilitates the in-person Open Writers Lab at Gemini Ink.

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Exurban Wind Turbine

Chip Dameron

July 28, 2024

 

Rotating clockwise,

three slow blades harvest the wind

as if it were time.

 

Chip Dameron’s latest book, Relatively Speaking, is a shared collection with Betsy Joseph. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he’s also been a Dobie Paisano fellow.

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Two Windmill Poems

Clarence Wolfshohl

July 7, 2024

The Evening Wind Up


Sometimes, usually in the second

or third inning, unless Beaumont

or Ft. Worth—whoever the Missions

were playing—had a big first,

the Coastal breeze would reach

us on the southern edge of the Balcones,

and it would be time.


My father and I would be sitting

outside under the mesquite, listening

to Jim Wiggins broadcast Mission games.

The sun was just a slit of orange

and the heat of the day was confused

in the darkening sky, and then

the breeze would slowly sift in.


My signal to unleash the windmill.

I’d wrestle the 2x6 brake lever,

and the vanes would start a slow rotation.

About then Bobby Balcena would step

to the plate, and the pitcher would go into

his wind-up as the Aeromotor’s rudder caught

the wind and the sucker rods began drawing.



Elegant Energy

Wind Farm at McCamey, Texas


Hundreds of elegant towers sleek

against mesa rimmed sky

curve silence.

Propellers turn

in stately ponder. 


Fifty years ago these hills

sat in smell of oil

like bad manners noticed

only by strangers driving through.

Walking beams hunkered low,

pistons keeping Earth’s engine afire.

Black monotony of pumping

like maniacal birds at richness edge.


Now, these towers stand

high to catch western wind,

hum a cosmic chant

as if free of gravity and set

on galactic exploration–

giant propellers spinning out fire

to lift Earth into the air.

Native of San Antonio, Clarence Wolfshohl has been active in the small press as writer and publisher for sixty years.  More recently he has published in Southwest American Literature, The Mailer Review, New Texas, New Letters, and Texas Poetry Assignment.


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Hometowns

Milton Jordan

June 30, 2024

   The windmill and the water-tank

   Still stand on solid ground.  

Jimmie Dale Gilmore 


Usually in autumn we head back to town,

still well beyond Houston’s sprawling reach,

and stay, as always, in unit eighteen   

at the east end of Blanchard’s Travelers Rest,

though few travelers still use this route.


Our first view cresting the rise from the southeast

slowly turning blades on the town windmill,

once, with its matching sister on the west end,

the primary water source for our hometown

now long served by the LCRA.


Blanchard’s oldest nephew, Scott, who’s run  

the Travelers Rest for a dozen years,

says he had thought he’d outlast those rusting blades

but warned us this year we’d best consider

a freeway motel next October.

Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He co-edited the first Texas Poetry Assignment anthology, Lone Star Poetry, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022.

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Tilting

Jim LaVilla-Havelin

June 30, 2024


it will fall soon


one day, it felt like out of nowhere,

the stalk rose from the sharp-edged mandala

that is agave


rose to propogate and die

blossoms atop it, whirligig wonder

mixed feelings - it will fall soon


and be gone

but on its way to dying -

flamboyant, joyous 


she says, it looks like something

out of Dr. Seuss, and I’m remembering

Thidwick’s commodious antlers 


and Gary gives it back its name, tureng 

word for it -  quiote

which seems quite perfect to me


that knight on horseback, followed 

closely by Sancho, on burro

tilting at windmills - Quixote


become a metaphor for futility

when maybe, really, just a vegetable dream

to be transformed into  


white metal bladed giants, turning in

the wind, along the Gulf Coast and

deep into the Valley



Jim LaVilla-Havelin is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent, Tales from the Breakaway Republic, a chapbook, was published by Moonstone Press, Philadelphia, in May 2022. LaVilla-Havelin is the Coordinator for National Poetry Month in San Antonio.


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A Texas Whirligig Memoir

Jan Seale

June 30, 2024

From the plane window she sees the wind machines,

turbines lined against the sky rising from the patchwork quilt

of Rio Grande farms, giant three-winged toys 

dancing by command or lolling in the Gulf breeze.


And the clank-duhduh-clank of a childhood windmill

eight hundred miles north, still in Texas, this time 

out on the Caprock, comes on her screen.


It’s night and the girl is only half asleep when 

her aunt’s voice comes clear, “George, 

get up and go turn off that windmill!”

It seems the chattering metal of the splayed-out 

pinwheel, so necessary by day for the wash,

the garden, the thirst-slaking of animals

has been left in the ON position. 

Now the night wind has cancelled out 

the summer day and the farmer’s windmill

 has succumbed to a dark insistent charm: 

water happily spilling over the tank,

intent on miring the girl’s swing set below.

Precious water must be saved.

Something must be done.


A small oath bleeps from the bedroom

(the girl knows she is not supposed to hear it).

Bedsprings squeak, boots moan,

and a giant clomps through the hall. The girl knows 

the uncle will bang wide the kitchen door,

march across the yard to the windmill, pull the chain,

magically closing off the water from deep down,

the water no more slopping over the side of the tank.


So the string of memory is threaded, from preparing 

to land on the Texas coast among the giant winged towers,

to lowering 70 years ago to the Texas Panhandle,

a girl listening, listening all the way across Texas,

all the way across time and circumstance,

the wind making itself known on giant rotor blades 

that travel the highways, mount towers, twist—

as it were—in the wind, fulfill their electrical destiny;

the wind skipping across giant Texas to the whirligigs 

huffing icy water from deep aquifers.


And long-ago girls listen to the clank-duhduh-clank,

then, hearing nothing, drift into sleep, knowing 

their swing sets, and they, are safe come morning.


Jan Seale lives in deep South Texas.  She has authored nine poetry volumes as well as books in fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature.  She is the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate.

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The Wind Pump

The Wind Pump
Read by Vincent Hostak

Vincent Hostak

June 30, 2024

Gusting across a flat, dry plain, 

a design unbroken until El Capitan’s rise,

and having reached the Place of the Late Sunset,

the wind looks for a spot to rest.


“Cast your burden here, there’s plenty of room”

say the vanes of a lone wind pump.

It is a lie, there’s no rest to be found here.

You must always work to draw the water,

pierce the pores to find the long-lost lakes.


The next tallest structure is a retired reef,

a clash of copper against persistent blue,

the ancient work of creatures, minute and tender,

layered into throngs in the sea.


The land works deep into dusk:

scree scuttles down a beveled crest,

it joins the pulse of this whirling time.

With creaking blades and aeolian sigh,

the wind pump heaves into its second shift.

Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.


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