Your Sunday Poem

This from Virginia Hamilton Adair from "Ants on the Melon."

Second Coming

all the little flowers
fringing the stones
& pale as halloween

dry for a long time now
quiver in the low wind
close to the sand

hanging in there
saving their seeds
dead but not gone

waiting for the resurrection
come again someday
matter of faith

rain.

Your Sunday Poem

Apropos our recent heat wave and waiting for that first whiff of smoke, hoping the summer with no summer kept the chaparral full of moisture and by doing so slid by our burning time, this by Virginia Hamilton Adair, from her book of collected poems, "Ants on the Melon."

Firewind

In September
the Sant'Ana

makes dogs tremble
arsonists go mad
lovers bite in bed

at all hours
sirens howling
into the foothills

along the ridges
rows of hideous suns
at midnight

trees burst

insane deer
run with the horses.

Your Sunday Poem

This from Ants on the Melon by Virginia Hamilton Adair.

Now You Need Me

When the rains come
you remember
our old closeness
humping along
in the wet.
You grope the dark
where I hang
morosely
by my crooked neck.
You pull off my cover
shake me till my
ribs jiggle
and a moth flies out.
Your hand reaches under
my black skirt
and up one leg
thin as a cane
until I open wide
with a rusty squawk
hovering above you
like a dark and loving
raven, said the old
umbrella, her night
full of holes.

Your Sunday Poem

This by Virginia Hamilton Adair from her collection of poems, Ants on the Melon, The Modern Library, 1999

An Hour to Dance

For a while we whirled
over the meadows of music
our sadness put away in purses
stuffed into old shoes or shawls

the children we never were
from cellars and closets
attics and faded snapshots
came out to leap for love
on the edge of an ocean of tears

like a royal flotilla
Alice's menagerie swam by
no tale is endless
the rabbit opened his watch
muttering late, late
time to grow
old.