August 2022
Bio Note: I grew up in a cooler and much rainier place than Phoenix, but somehow I ended up here and I still love the desert. From Manchester, England, I went to Vienna and later brought my emerging interest in poetry with me to Arizona. I have a recent book of not-so-recent poems (Unmapped Worlds) that show I haven't always been preoccupied with the tensions and beauty of desert. At the moment I live within reach of the large desert mountain park where the coyotes are at home when not coming down for water and to stroll along Walatowa and other streets.
Sick Day
First light: a thrasher’s eye
in orange bright
as the sun as it hauls itself
from behind the houses still asleep
while nighthawks fly back
to spend their desert days
camouflaged as limbs
of dry mesquite.
The mountain
is a headache rising, the pond
close by a sneeze that waits
for its release, and a dry cough is caught
inside each saguaro stem
from the foothills to
the peaks.
And the path, the path,
the path goes wearily along the wash
more slowly than the day before
and never looks around
to see the grass where quail
find bare spots in which
they marry the dust
and burrow with their breasts where
the earth’s skin feels no pain.
Photo credit: David Chorlton
The coyotes waking up
offer a chorus to the sky as it opens
to receive it. Kyrie eleison:
the rocks cry out for mercy. Roots
ache in the ground. Sunlight
fills the first
and only drop of rain
as it falls
on drought’s own land. Stars trail
behind the nighthawk
flying from day
into night, writing in birdscript
on the darkened air. The desert
blues with moonlight. A dry cough
crawls through an arroyo.
The heat exhales.
Thirst is prayer.
©2022 David Chorlton
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL