Thursday, May 30, 2013

To prairies and the thrum of first cicadas in the sonoran desert ~


 
Prairie Sure

Would I miss the way a breeze dimples
the butter-colored curtains on Sunday mornings,
or nights gnashed by cicadas and thunderstorms?
The leaning gossip, the half-alive ripple
of sunflowers, sagging eternities of corn
and sorghum, September preaching yellow, yellow
in all directions, the windowsills swelling
with Mason jars, the blue sky bluest borne
through tinted glass above the milled grains?
The dust, the heat, distrusted, the screen door
slapping as the slat-backed porch swing sighs,
the hatch of houseflies, the furlongs of freight trains,
and how they sing this routine, so sure, so sure—
the rote grace of every tempered life?

Carol Light

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Vespers



A linnet pulls a tuft of cowhair
snarled on barbed wire.
The threads of hair shine red-gold
in her beak.  She flies into last light.

At the horizon earth & sky
reach a truce.  The sun just down,
barn swallows tumble in the afterglow
above the slow turning windmill.
The hill darkens,

a saddle rubbed with oil,
not yet the complete black of Nevada night.
There’s the soft whickering of a horse,
the flames of a hundred Asian poppies nodding red,
then the descending quiet.