Poems can be prayers
Sweet Acacia and Prairie Verbena
Frame the birdsong that
Voices all that is
Unsilenced
The Flame Tree seethes
But it’s the Jacaranda that
Spins its leaves
In the tortured artist seeing
Way of things
Wild Mustard hillsides fall away to
Vast mustard
Stillness
Where a million bobbing heads
Make music invisible
The thistle is high and purple
The cactus inaccessible
Santa Barbara Daisy white
Softens the entire
Crevasse
California Poppies run berserk
As if each cup must hold some
Vital stuff
Not puncture the landscape with color
That draws the bees like water
Catalina Silver Lace
Octopus Agave
This one’s called the Matilijia Poppy
But everybody knows it as
The Sunnyside Flowering Egg
On a cactus someone carved “I LOVE T”
Not “I LOVE”
There must forever be an object
Like still we’re orphaned in time
In a 1st grade grammar class somewhere
