Take me to deserts of red and gold
To ruins whose people still linger in the silence
To miles of empty spaces
And no sound other than the winds
Where the saguaro stand watch over the centuries.

Two of us watching the sky
An unlikely pair, my dad and I

The tree lawn
Has a damp nighttime smell

No clouds hide the lights
Thousands in a row, maybe millions

They come in rows
So distant I can barely see them

But they are coming
And we are not afraid

Day 5 poem



I am offering this night to you. From my child’s world, I saw the universe coming towards me, larger than any earth thing, a thousand lights in a row, coming in the summer night.

I remember I was not afraid, I did not run away. I lay on the night grass and watched, feeling the awe of the coming, the unknown of it, the enormity.  But I was not afraid. It came to all of us, caring in its infinite unknown. The lights.

I speak for the sun, distant as it is.  No matter.  I tell it’s story every day the sun shows itself.

I speak for history and for the current. For the passage of humans. No matter. I tell their story whether good or bad, alive or dead.

I speak for the lost and not found. No matter. I see them in my dreams and my nightmares. I feel their hearts beating.

In the ‘50’s we all lived in black and white, marching in step with each other, our lawns making us ashamed we weren’t more perfectly matched.

We didn’t know it but we were waiting for the 60’s, that time of candied heart love and daffodil embroidered clothes.

We got more refined, less cluttered in the 70’s but kept a mellowed down pink turned taupe, having grown too cool for pastels.

But little did we know the permed haired, gaudy colors would leap out at us in the 80’s, an overdone shiny world, trying hard to find something lost, but never known.

Relief came with the 90’s, calming us down with normal colors, not too bright, just right, giving us hope we were getting better.

But around the century’s corner lurked the black and white intel world, a mystery that was inexplicably mingled with blood, too terrible to imagine, only finding a reprieve with a safer, mutely colored world, diverse and reassuring.

The 20-teens got even more comfortable, washed with seeming inclusion, ignoring the faint cries from the earth and its creatures.

Then 2016 rolled in and the world erupted, leaking and oozing, quickly covering the humans and their earth colors with grey, seeping into black. Warning us of nature’s revolution lying in wait.

2020 and the world is the color of fear, yellow searching for red fear.  But as we wait, hiding inside, the earth quietly begins to pulse, the trees suddenly bulging with the need to blossom, as all the creatures sigh in turn, hopeful, waiting to begin again.

Brave world.

Sadness is a well
A world of wells
The women gathered there
For centuries
Forever

The same t-shirt
The same guitar
The same long face with black beard
The same words
Forty years and the same
We are all young
We are all old.