daybreak and the little moon in the sky

by Charlene Langfur

The sky is a sweet, deep, dark blue before the light breaks.

The little moon, an arc over the tall fan palms.

A single star glowing over a hot planet.

This is a birthday poem in the Sonoran Desert.

The poem tracking where we are, marking it safely.

I think this is what the poem does now. Saves us.

Reminds of the best we can do, remembering the miracle

of stopping to see what was around us all along.

Fan palm leaves alive, green, deep green, swaying,

in a place of sand and scraggly wild grass.

Mesquite covered with small pods all over it,

cactus on fire with yellow flowers and red fruit.

What goes on living no matter what. I follow along

after what lives, what goes for more where there is less.

I think, why not grow older along with the universe,

eat cupcakes with lemon icing, blow out the candles on top,

on a planet of bombs and threats, a pandemic

that does not quit. And I keep going back to the poem and the sky,

my rescued dog’s wild kisses, the idea nothing’s amiss even if it is,

and I open up the day this way, all in, agog with the new, exactly who

and where I am in the desert in the pandemic in the recession

at the beginning of earth changes.

Charlene Langfur is an LGBTQ and green writer, an organic gardener with many publications in Room, Weber, The Stone Canoe, most recently in The Hiram Poetry Review, Poetry East, Acumen, an essay in Still Point Arts Quarterly, and a short story “The Force of Atoms in an Imperfect World” highlighted on the Hudson Valley Writer’s Guild website.