This morning as usual, i walked out to our driveway to retrieve the Sunday paper. Making the coffee and retrieving the paper while Maureen makes one of her wonderful (and healthy breakfasts, sometimes even including a sausage patty for me). Breakfast and newspaper reading has become our daily routine, interrupted only when i play early golf.
But when i looked up over my neighbor’s house across the street, Mount Miguel once again took my breath away. The photo below is not as clear as it could be because i took it quickly with my phone before the clouds rose or burned off. It doesn’t do the scene justice. Still, it is an awesome sight and encouraged me to post a poem that has been here before and included in my book: A Pocket of Resistance: Selected Poems.
Mount Miguel February Sunrise
East north east of my front door,
Mount Miguel wore a shroud this morning;
Low clouds draped across her shoulders
below the peak at sunrise.
By circumstance, my front door faces east,
greeting the sun god
like the Navajo’s hogan door has done for centuries
over in Four Corners, a mountain or so
east of here.
Man’s antennae now reach skyward
on Mount Miguel’s peak,
silhouetted black against the rising orange orb,
before it slings white hot heat and light low to the south,
moving through the day,
bowing to the Baja lands of Mexico,
as it is wont to do in the winter months
here in the high desert.
The instruments of new fangled transmission look foreboding:
Spanish castle towers of the inquisition;
I wonder if the Kumayai once sat atop,
above the cloud shroud,
lifting their own clouds of smoke,
transmitting their own news of the day.
The city folks implanted here
tend to forget what this land beneath them was;
really is.
We have learned to just add water
to get paradise,
now overrun with those that forget
to look East at the sunrise
silhouettes of the ghost talkers.