The Young Saguaro and December Skies

Poems of Place and Time

This sonnet is written to a particular saguaro cactus, the one that stands in our backyard garden. It has been a magnificent pleasure to watch its growth over the past four years. It had already been living here for many years before we arrived, and the garden is being built carefully around it.

Saguaros are very long-lived, and they take their time coming to maturity. The first blooms typically occur when they are thirty-five years old, and the first arms appear some fifteen years after that.

Our hillsides here are full of saguaros that must be well over a hundred years old, but my friend in the garden is still a youngster… as they reckon it!

Sonnet to a Young Friend on Coming of Age

Of course, I cannot ever know your date
of birth: it doesn’t really matter, here
in the bright sun beneath the timeless, great
blue sky. You’ve stood here, year by silent year,
and you are young. I saw your blooms appear–
the first ones ever–just last summer, high
above my head. How young, and yet a seer
who’s drunk the rain and heard the solemn cry
of ravens whirling through the rock-edged sky,
and seen stars arcing through the autumn nights.
Yet much is in your future: birds that fly
to build a nest next to your soul; uprights
of arms that pray unto the sun; and I–
how young you still shall be when I shall die!

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And now an ode to December skies here in the desert.

Sonoran December

How they’re changing, month by month, the heavens,
like a living thing instinct with movement.
Now, December, they’re a distant azure
high and soft with pale clouds forming, rising
just above the mountains westward, eastward;
and upon the mountaintops they’re trailing
fringes of gray rain at silver sundown,
promises of snow at rosy daybreak.
Then they rise before they reach the valley
and dissolve into the quiet morning
or the night-sky, hard and clear and sable,
filled with stars no cloud has dimmed from shining.

And the fragrances of mid-December!
Air washed clean by cold and silver midnights
nestling in among the many breathing
leaves that stir and waken–life and laughter
of the living things that dance the month down
from the heats of summer, sprouting, growing.
Faintly scent of flowers, like a half-heard
melody upon the distant breezes,
murmur on an air that raptly listens,
wrapping round the winter’s leaves and flowers.
Then the glowing scent of rain that’s fallen
not so far away, the resin, moisture
of a desert rainfall, fragrance drifting
down upon the valley lifts the heartache,
weariness of summer, lilts the singing
of the tiny birds returning safely
from the winter’s dire storms to southlands
where the snow is faint and pink at morning,
and its fragrance is a distant whisper
in the valley, at the azure midday,
while the skies in ever-moving morrows
breathe December through the singing sunlands.

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