Thanks for the info, NnB.
Have a Terrific Thursday.
The Empty Land
Sunrise over the western lands
scrub brush estates of pine and peaks
Where a drifting hawk silently seeks
prey in the red rock laid in bands
Tumbleweed littered fences there
outline man’s boundaries rusting away
Grey wood cabins hinting at another day
and only history really seems to care
Faint trails pass over hills and disappear
like those who came before a time of our own
now but stark reminders, like the whitening bones
when life was paid for in coin most dear
Wind song sings of what has passed
truth as gossamer now as a spider’s webbing lace
A ghostly echo of a yesterday’s oft demanding pace
a history now firmly set as fate did cast
From the Mesa comes the soliloquy of a wolf’s call
a lonely aching of a single life in a singular land
Set here amid russet and rusting sedimentary bands
where the weight of time and timelessness falls
Erosion carves an empty landscape anew
ever changing and yet somehow unchanged
An eon’s span leaves even spirits deranged
where forever does as it may be wont to do
The sun bakes the land, with a weighty hand
forcing life to fit a mold of survival’s need
Here among the rustle of brittle tumbleweeds
and Cholla, Pinon, and the whisper of the sand
Night falls and the air cools, an answer to a prayer
Life comes out to scurry and hurry in the night
A strange world under the moon’s silvered light
And across the land ancient memories walk there
Under a star lit sky the distant storm rumbles on
and the flow of time is a sea of silence laid over all
Broken only by the lingering echo of the coyote’s call
until the first subtle shading tints of the coming dawn