A Farmer’s Rain Dance

Though I strive and turn the wheel
to mill my sparse grain,
I covet the parched land,
avidly seeking, vain.
In every revolution
I hope for difference and not of same;
I beg God for the life-giving
weeping, changing rain.

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Palm Tree

My favorite is the palm tree’s woven trunk
smoothly grooved beneath my hands

As if carefully planed by a divine carpenter
the rough bark nestles against my cheek

The sweet decay of coconuts counterpoints
dropping bounty without end

I too, seek to become a tree
and layer years upon me

Truce

What deity’s idle daydreams
Caused the rain and sun to form a rainbow?
If only two people with opposite dispositions
Could end strife as easily

Apple

I do not think we were made in God’s image
For God is all-knowing
And perhaps that omniscience brings with it
A placid eternity that engenders an unending boredom
Perhaps he thought
I wonder what it would be like to not know
To feel happiness and sadness
By maddening turns and to love and fight with equal measure
And he shaped us out of clay and made one mouth
For us to smile and frown with
And cast us in a garden that was already imperfect
For in the center of that lush promise
Hung a crimson lie:
The Fruit

Comet

Whenever I feel old
I look at the lights across the water
On that bridge older than I
I think of elms and oaks
And all the children they have sheltered
Playing underneath their scarred boughs
Compared to many things
I am like a comet
A streak of light
Momentarily glimpsed
And smiled upon by that
Eternal eye