Desert Bloom

Cold desert bloom gathers colors like lost-bird red
and faded treacle, and varies the oasis of California.
Time and sand canyons, endlessly baked and sparse too,
sigh in the shadow of a cloud that heaves silver passing
cool and Maylike the rain on alien petals tucked tight as
though wanting and waiting and wilting hard for harder
sunlight. After hundred years’ drought and now so thorn’d,
the fragrant desert bloom whose delicacy minces and makes
TV crews cry and thankfully wordless; beauty is distant,
where once honey-colored playas were forgotten and
unvisited then bloom’d again.
                 Poppies blaze Antelope Valley
a dry, windy wash into a painterly saturated scene that draws
out the old Chinese and their quiet wives to walk and nod
at strangers, like the faraway woman from the west side in
yoga attire and thinness, or the laughing Mexican family
whose ancestors weren’t ever part this hard-tack land
of Alta California.
                                What have you done, desert bloom?
For a moment we’re not here and then suddenly it’s in
color. In a hundred years it’ll be back again. For the rest
of the time it’s high desert—thorny, scorpioned, bright
and oilless.

Reviews

[emmajoy]

'.. and Maylike the rain on alien petals tucked tight as ~~ though wanting and waiting and wilting hard for harder ~~ sunlight. '

Wonderfully expressive words, the heart of a poem about a miracle that repeats itself then, fades into a hundred year sleep. And, what extraordinary pictures you conjur about those people come to see the desert bloom ..