Back Yard

Shine on, O moon of summer.
Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,
All silver under your rain to-night.

An Italian boy is sending songs to you to-night from an accordion.
A Polish boy is out with his best girl; they marry next month;
to-night they are throwing you kisses.

An old man next door is dreaming over a sheen that sits in a
cherry tree in his back yard.

The clocks say I must go—I stay here sitting on the back porch drinking
white thoughts you rain down.

Shine on, O moon,
Shake out more and more silver changes.

Carl Sandburg

When A Child Asks About Angels

When my brother was swept away in a culvert
During a flash flood and into a drainpipe
Under a road, the stopped motorists, two elderly
Sisters on their way home from church, counted
Their breath until he spilled out in the ditch
On the other side alive where they cheered him
From the rail and walked down the path in the rain
In their Sunday shoes, flowered hats and dresses, and they
Guided him through the trees to the shelter of their car.
I am grateful forever to their blanket and thermos
And how they hugged him warm with their bodies
While he was trembling, their huge gorgeous bodies.

Stuart Dischell

Proclamation

Cuk Son is a story.
Tucson is a linguistic alternative.
The story is in the many languages
still heard in this place of
Black Mountains.
They are in the echo of lost, forgotten languages
heard here even before the people arrived.

The true story of this place
recalls people walking
deserts all their lives and
continuing today, if only
in their dreams.
The true story is ringing
in their footsteps in a
place so quiet, they can hear
their blood moving
through their veins.
Their stories give shape to the
mountains encircling this place.
Wa:k is the story of
water memories of this desert.

Citizens gravitate to Sabino Canyon.
The humming, buzzing, clicking of water life,
the miracle of desert streams
on smooth boulders.
Rocks, sediment older than life itself
serve as reminders.
It should be unnecessary for sticky notes
to remind us what a desert place is.
A place dependent on rains of summer,
light dusting of snow,
the rarity of dry beds as rebel rivers.
It is real desert people who lift their faces
upward with the first signs of moisture.
They know how to inhale properly.
Recognizing the aroma of creosote in the distance.
Relieved the cycle is beginning again.
These people are to be commended.

It is others who lament the heat of
a June day, simultaneously
finding pride on surviving
the heat—a dry heat.
These individuals should simply
be tolerated.

Opposed to those who move
from one air-conditioned environment
to another, never acknowledging the heat of summer.
Being grateful for November, when
temperatures drop below eighty,
complaining of the lack of seasons in the desert,
heading for mountains
to see colors—
these people—well, what can we say.
We must feel for the dogs of Tucson.
Who bark as if they belong to somebody and
who, before the rain, wish they were a color other than black.

Ofelia Zepeda