What’s the use of all the sun’s gold

now that it melts into blazing lava

and singes your sweating forehead?

 

You wander about the city in high noon.

The streets and buildings radiate more heat

than the sun in a poor harvester’s hut.

 

No doubt, we all have a pining dream

of a northern land with glaciers and ice cream,

which we can’t enter awake.

 

Gulping for air, you think you’ll grow gills,

the dull cicadas’ song hurts you whole,

broken by blight, you’ll soon turn to ashes.

 

You run away and urge your steps to climb

the breath wind like a spider on a wall

and turn the page of the year’s calendar.

 

The horse of hunger gallops across the fields

stricken by yellow pestilence,

the udders meant for the unborn are dry wells.

 

Flocks of hungry prayers gather in the air

and pirouette like moving illusions –

you take them for sacks sagging with rain

 

from which joy’s moist breath will pour

and finally assemble the broken shadows

on earth’s wrinkled, blistering palms.