In the Time of Yellow Flowers

(In loving memory of Dr. Cliff Crawford 1932-2010)


In the time of yellow flowers
you led the earth
into its fruit-drunk slumber
took it with you
as brown swallowed green.
And every bosque bird
knows your name from the bladed edge,
grey ghosts of cottonwoods
and opaque recesses

They know you
in the beaver's concaved trunks
and adobe hives
flushed from red fields
of Johnson grass and willows
tall as teenagers
thick with summer,
in the Round Dance
of lemon butterflies and alfalfa
the bittersweet tobacco of decay
unearthed in the last irrigations
in the tenor of water pushing through
the acequia crossing
and the quiet soprano of ripples
ironed into mirrors
of gold and blue
in the river's new gifts unwrapped
in the final sighs of the Sangres
love’s deep ecology rattles and hums
from lonely elms along farm roads
and the Rio at dusk
where we walk asking,
and what of us now
of all of this?


And we remember to stop
and listen
as the cool river bottom air
climbs out of bed
wakes the salt grass
follows old channels slowly
behind us, as you did
the warm pockets
rest gently on our shoulders
rustle a lullaby,
it is your song we now sing
to our own creations
And in this time of yellow flowers,
we will again look up and greet
the first staccato of cranes.


Yasmeen Najmi


copyright 2010 Yasmeen Najmi