PERSEIDS OVER PAWNEE PRAIRIE

Summer sky stars shimmer
above through the gauze of the tent.
We lay tangled in hair below
on a buffalo grass robe.

Crickets rub songs in the clicking grass.
Coyotes yap and yowl on the moonless mesa.
Snake scale cool sage breath
soaks our naked skin.

Tasting star milk on the swell of parted lips,
barking blue spirals to the cedar-scented light,
splayed out on the crackling clay
beneath the many-gone suns, the night

takes in whole what's left.
Smeared across the Milky Way prairie sky,
meteors, sucked back
into the infinite field of stars.


© 2000 by Richard W. Todd

Next Poem