Clouds roll lazily over the desert sky, late light bending low— like Bob Dylan humming through an iPhone. Nothing to hold on to but the way the day lets go.
(In November of 2012, Tom Markey and I posted an article, Ecocide Arizona Style — The Cow That Ate The West. The article was about the disappearing water in the San Simon Valley in southeast Arizona. This poem suggest the verdict is in.)
Ecocide Arizona Style
The west is dying of thirst. You can hear it in the cracked riverbeds, in cottonwoods gone skeletal, in the silence where frogs used to sing.
The Colorado staggers, a vein opened too long, bled for lawns, for swimming pools, for another desert empire of cul-de-sacs.
This is not drought— this is the verdict. We were warned, and we kept on building as if the sky were infinite.
Mark it well: when the last drop dries, sand covers the southwest, the desert will not mourn us. It will simply take itself back.
Little Joe Washington at the Houston International Festival (04/19/08) — Image by kenne
“They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better. You sing ’cause that’s a way of understanding life.”
‘As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated . . .’ Complications, ambiguities, nonsequiturs. I keep searching for clarity . . . lucidity; and I know each time I seek that I’ll become more entangled. No, I’m not bored — just scared.”
Oatman Arizona Wild Donkeys (Christmas 2012) — Image by kenne
Below the Black Mountains of Arizona is an old ghost town abandoned by gold miners. The town is named Oatman, and when prospectors left, they also left something behind— their four-legged friends. Today, Oatman is a historic Route 66 pit stop famously infested with wild donkeys. Source: abc 10 Sacramento
