Summer Among the Lilies
Early summer brings lilies
like lemon drops, or
fallen stars.
Then come Trumpet lilies like pagodas for hummingbirds…
perfume at the heart,
petals like open arms…
And nectar sweet as a kiss.
Carbon Futures
In tar beach towns roughnecks cast up,
climbing through muck like blackened grease monkeys
between sumps gummy with acrid crude.
Whole families broke down on the nuts and bolts of production,
earning poverty for their trouble and even
sleeping on ground The Company owned.
In heat only a rattlesnake could love and
breeze rank with petroleum funk they stuck
tents and shanties on ditch backs
like burr scabs on a starving dog,
stalking that next whiskey dollar the way
a lover drinks in an embrace.
Oil owned my family.
Its flare offs and blowouts they plowed into
a history of mud and fists and cable
song roaring through crops of derricks,
fields they planted for The Man, rigs
drilled like lightening bolts into the dirt.
Ruts and crushed gravel roads fed acres of hulks
raised from dust devils like some hellish corn
grinding ground day and night for a promise
of moisture, the remembered curl of spring sweet fiddleheads,
for the sound of ancient ocean surf long fallen
into a slurry of shit black dreams.
Until in sulphuric fury the tide turned
gushing back in a rumble of carbon futures,
splits of gas, and diesel, and kerosene
oozing blood of machines,
banking the metallic stink of money into
the sweaty cents of escape.
© Version 2007 Val Morehouse. All Rights Reserved.