Burnt

In June, I received word that two of my poems were to be published in the Fall 2008 Inspirit Journal, edited by the Baughman United Methodist Church of New Cumberland, Pennsylvania. I have been so pleased with their Journals and very happy to have the third and fourth of my poems published. I am doing this a bit backwards, but I am submitting them on this blog, at this time.

Burnt

The floodgates of heaven were closed to us,
every cloud a taunting tease under a bully sun,
ever rushing to kiss the ground of another land.
It was spring by the calendar, not the greening
prairie hills. Along dry creek beds, grass and hope
turned to dust; the thorn and thistle were our reward.
Year after year, we were the poor banished children
of Eve, scorched by the welding torch of the sun.

When the rains came, the bloom was on the ditch
rose, once more. In the shade of tall sunflowers,
the cicada chanted his monotonous buzz-songs
to summer. Black angus peppered luxuriant
pastures, grazed the wild-rye-fringed cow paths
to brimming water tanks, under rasping windmills.
Blue flax sashayed on the shoulders of country roads,
near the tangle of black chokecherry thickets. In the
fencerows of alfalfa-scented fields, the honey bee
dives headlong into the fluted necks of yellow clover.

I walk along the saffron leaves of the cottonwoods,
along the the river. It's October, and the sticky spider
webs of dread sprawl and adhere to my soul. I dread
the end of the green milk and honey of this one,
abundant summer. I want to whine, like the locust
laments 'till the killing frost. I'm afraid, so afraid the
good luck ran out, and homesick, for the flickering
fireflies of hope, at dusk, in the Promised Land.