"For a Dry River"

 FOR A DRY RIVER

You walk out under an old cold moon

to call for vision.

You'd settle, on nights like this, for less.

You beat the drum, 

but there is no heart rhythm

to follow or find. Dry.

All you hear is the litany of your mind,

traffic, a dusty haze obscuring the distance.

Your time is eaten by lists

of little things to do.

 

The sounds of discord ring

where lucid air once whispered

among the stones, voices

voices where once a river ran.

 

Even here, a river, once.

Before too many cattle, too many cars,

too much thankless taking

in this age of blind entitlement.

As if the waters would always flow

to green the waiting desert, monsoon,

Chubasca coming…………

as if the breast would never run dry.

 

As if, as if there none

yet unborn

to hunger and to thirst.

The river is dry.

 

And you hold your hands to the mountain.

You ask, "Whose hands are these?"

Am I not also this land?

One small and moving piece of it? 

Are there any to remember?

 

Where have they gone, the friends of my youth?

Coyote moon celebrant, singing in the canyons,

Saguaro, the Fingers of God

pointing to the stars,

Loba, Puma, Roadrunner;

even Snake and Scorpion,

(who leave all stones best unturned.)

 

Gone to postcards,

kachina dolls made in China.

 

I sing to the ghosts now.

Spirals are written

among the holy rocks

mute remembrance even here

where once a river ran.

 

Lauren Raine  (2002)