Flying Island

Song of the Radio Bees by Norbert Krapf Back then when Indy was a world away to the north I was a teenager in Kentuckiana washing and waxing cars and drinking beer with chums when the engines sounded on the radio like wild bees in the woods swarming nearer and nearer as a loud hum turned deafening and they roared closer. When I first sat in the grandstand decades later as a man circling into his seventies I heard a female voice say, “Ladies and gentlemen start your engines” and those bees roared again, louder than ever before. The low-slung cars roared off, big bumps raised on my arms and legs, and my lips smacked with the taste of honey and malt as this late song brewed. Norbert Krapf, former Indiana poet laureate, has recently published his 12th poetry collection, The Return of Sunshine , about his Colombian-German-American grandson. He is completing a collection of poems for children and a prose memoir about his writ...