ENVIRONMENTAL Poem: Drought Days, by Martha Fox

1

Laconic clouds stalled
all August long.

Still optimistic,
on her knees in the soil,
she dismisses a wariness
among the weeds.

Windless, soundless sparrows
hide in drooping pear boughs,
sensing…

Her sweat
leaches into her work.

2

A woman walking brown woods
breaks the backs of maple twigs:

puffs of dust
feather her bare ankles —

tawny tufts
of a molting owl.

Her fingers stroke
an oak leaf — parchment

where this season wrote
its too-early conclusion. So

she reads the trail she hikes,
and brook and pond

gape empty-eyed when she scans
the unwell land.

3

In the sere pasture,
Monarch eggs fry on milkweed.
Bees faint on bolting mint.
Root fires smolder.

With the absence of waters

and their ancient airs—
the silence of sediment:

tracks zig-zag in riverbeds
stamped by Sauroposeidon,
Wind lifts silt, erases…

4

Predicted rains come
to nothing. Patchy drizzle
sizzles on crisp grass.

Closing open hands, people
pack into sparse shade
while the sun drums

on and on in the chest
of the sky