The Desert

Heads tilt back
Towards skies that move in healing silence
From blue to pink and back to blue again.

The world is speaking now,
Through hoards of swallows,
In a kind of unison that makes rough wind—soft.

Holy in it’s absence,
Life exists beyond the living
As if it never came to be, but has always been.

Shrouded in antiquity,
Joshua trees reign like teased out crosses:
Sepulchers in God’s ashtray-

Marking a Harshness that lies
Beneath the sanctity
Of Divine Light.

Perhaps it is a one-eyed dog gnawing on a Jesus chachskie;
A new mailbox with nothing inside;
A carcass of metal machinery; forgotten.

Propped by 4 runners speeding down highways,
Dust hangs pendulous
As if to conceal the half-living:

Prostrate on their backs,
Waiting for some semblance of salvation
Till the finality of a days end draws near,

And light coalesces into tiny miracles that sit,
Like a celestial frame,
Around a thumbprint of Opal light.

Perhaps this is Deliverance, come at last,
To remediate the feeble cries of the fallen…
Can it be?

Or is it the wind:
Contentious; Undying;
Turning on the motion sensor.

By Carmen Flood