In one of my favorite haunts, Crossfire Canyon, the creek is flooding as at the lake upstream water jets from the dam’s spillway for the first time ever. The spring runoff is not even halfway through as a record snowpack melts from the Abajo Mountains upstream and runs down into the desert.
But here at WIZ, [...]
A solitary hawk beneath
a sky of lavender and gold,
assumed the vantage of a tree
and there reconnaissanced the cold.
Once-melting drifts of speckled snow
grew stiff against the freezing ground.
The humid gusts abandoned hope
and left the air without a sound.
What once was flowing now was tamed;
the rivulets, muddy and curled
lost strength and stream, as puddles became
glass windows to [...]
I
The Rancher Speaks
I was in the sheep business for years.
Sold off my sheep and got into the cattle business and now I have friends.
The cattle men talk to me.
I suppose what finally drove me out was the predators.
The eagles swooping down and taking newborn lambs
and there was nothing we could do about it.
We tried noisemakers [...]
Today the secret names of everything
come back, the ancient names.
Tribe-of-the-morning names
call to me from the wind, which I know
as shut-your-eyes-breath,
hands-over-your-ears, gone-with-the-ice-song,
hymn-rising-out-of-cottonwood-sap.
Smell-of-dogwood; it is called,
smell-of-willow.
Daffodil has become again
small-pusher-of-earth-and-snow,
light-out-of-stone,
seawater-turned-sunshine.
This morning has its own name,
separate from all other mornings,
fire-in-the-clouds
waking-in-the-folds-of-mountain,
joy-of-long-shadows.
And now spring has brought
mist-in-my-breath,
shining-on-the-rocks,
quick-and-noisy-in-the-canyon,
to make soft soil in the garden
where I kneel for the first time
on the almost-warm-gift-to-growing
and work [...]
Dusted red stone
wrapped in gray deluge
yields greened cliffs shimmering
like an unearthly vision
in sunshine’s morning haze.
Silver gray brush bears yellow blossom cascades.
Stands of ocotillo—no longer barren,
barricaded with thorns—
blush tiny green leaves until
burnt orange petals burst from their fingertips.
Drying mesquite scents air
alive with the rush of rabbits, cooing doves,
the hawk’s hunting cry, coyotes’ eerie babble,
silent lizards thawing [...]
Under these clouds the earth
Has raised a monument
To herself, tier by tier, a replica
Of the stone beneath my feet.
I am stone, too–stone
And one hot wick of life
Fusing me to the first generation,
Flaring forward from me to the last.
Stone, thread, and rain
One March, Grandfather held
A forked stick by the prongs
And walked slowly back and forth
Across the [...]
Sitting cross-legged beneath the cherry tree,
wearing her mother’s seed pearl necklace
and a sprig of jasmine on her bodice—
she offers blossoms to a gravestone.
The gilt and gold of late afternoon washes
through shadows. It’s springtime. Unripened
fruit hangs like quiet temple bells between
flowering cylinders of white, and brides
with dark branches. Somewhere in the sweet alone,
silence caps hilltops and [...]
Storm in these hills
frays each edge
of symmetry: shadow-snow
drawn under earth and stone
by threaded rain.
Bone-red willows
banked by sage
tangle cold echoes,
sharing the motion
of water turned wind
in search for transparent green.
_____________________________________________________________
Nani Lii S. Furse is a SAHM, proof that she’s learning textese in an effort to communicate with her teens and young adult children. She earned a [...]
To kick off WIZ’s Spring Poetry Runoff, we’re starting a haiku chain. This is a non-competitive (that is, not part of the poetry contest), everybody-can-participate activity, just for fun–a songfest for many voices.
A haiku is a classical Japanese poetical form, usually 17 syllables all in a single line in Japanese, but I understand that there [...]
A compass needle, a lizard, spins half a turn
To keep me in sight, tweaking my sense of direction:
Spring is coming — that way.
According to my 2010 turtle calendar, the Vernal Equinox arrives Saturday, March 20. To celebrate spring’s arrival last year, WIZ ran a Spring Poetry Run-off that turned out to be lots of fun. [...]