Emily Strauss VERSE-VIRTUAL 2016 April

April 2016

I'm a semi-retired English teacher with an M.A., not an M.F.A. I've written since college and have over 300 poems in public at numerous sites worldwide. I've still not made it to a chapbook or major publication. I generally write on the American West, or personal stories and scenes. If you search my name, I'm sure you will find a lot of my poems here and there.

Sere Hills

Almost golden under a faded sun
sere ochre hills barren, run
together without shadows,
tire tracks gouged across fallow
land too dry for trees,
yellow grasses withered,
dust freed to collect
across the tops
of rounded waves of hot
rises, one beyond the next,
several cattle trample their texts
into the earth in the lower washes,
their traces start and end
with a cracked cement trough,
dust-limbed they seem to bend
with the prevailing winds
burning the land into cracks,
they stare across the back
of the drought which binds
this land to the leaden sky.

Men and their trucks
stand poised to climb
steep dirt trails, dust rimed,
in a line the bucks face the hills
like broncos their engines thrill,
startled cows bolt from the corral
milling they breach the wire
fences, wild in heat and fire
invisible to those industrial
cowboys raring to pull their rigs
up the grades, their mouths full
of coals, spinning tires dig
into soft earth, carve more ruts
the sun glares redder than wine
cows hidden in the chaparral.