Welcome to Post-weekend Poetry and the seventy-second poem in this series. This week’s piece welcomes back Sandy Hartman.
Drought
Morning again, parched dry as death
Its frail glow waiting for another day
Adrift in the sifting dusts of drought
Scorched wisps of clouds
Fade in the heat smothered sun
Choking the last hope of rain
Wrapping my bones in a brown paper shroud
I want to rage against the outrage
Beat my fist against it
Twist free of this fire I cannot run from
Gather reason, protest, organize, negotiate
Go door to door and stir my complacent neighbors
Alert them to this relentless, unreasoning assault
On all that is my green mother world
Stop the burning away of life that leaves me orphaned
Bereft of all that made me, protected me, sustained me
All that I am
But I know each moment beforehand
That they will look right through me and say
Oh yes, it is so terribly hot
N’ it just won’t let up
We need rain bad
Then they’ll go on their way in silence
Knowing, like me, it’s already too late
© Sandy Hartman 7/9/12
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I asked Sandy what prompted this piece and she said…
It is dry here in the lower United States. A choking drought has gripped our central states and their harvest lands. No, not just for a year or two, but menacing for nearly a decade. Ah! Yes. Global warming is to blame. . .either that or it is the wrath of God announcing the end times, so our conservative brethren say. But no, it is not that easy to fabricate reasons once one knows the history of our central states and great Southwest. We have merely put off its ten thousand year history by tapping and draining the mighty artesian water bearing rock formations that lie beneath this region. Rock formations that have soaked up the water of life for millions of years. Now, the water is gone and the drying winds come again. This time, like the marvelous Anasazi civilization and the others that sustained their peoples long before them throughout the ages, we fade away from the great lands of the of the extinct camel and horse and now the buffalo.
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That’s really sad, and a thought-provoking inspiration for your poem. Thank you Sandy.
Sandy is a retired public school teacher at the high school and junior high levels, a member of Pen Women of America, Moxy Laureate for www.Moxywomen.com and the creator of the site www.eonwriter.com.
Her poetry is published in several journals and three poems placed first in various contests. She does not self-publish, her hubris in creating www.eonwriter.com, she says, is quite enough.
She’s had the good fortune to travel to several countries in Asia and lived for a time in Saigon, Vietnam and Vientiane, Laos during the war. She is most of all, a visionary poet, as you can well see by her site.
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