Poem: Cactus Flowers

 This is another of the poems I wrote in college, describing what was happening in my life with God. A desert landscape is usually associated with difficult times spiritually, but at this time I felt connected to the desert as a place of life, vividness, new things springing forth. The image of flowers blooming in the desert particularly caught me: hence this poem.

Gradual as evening, you

have me

securely as desert night

contains all its small creatures.

I sense the future’s shape

in your increasing simplicity:

like the desert

vivid and direct.

Few things are necessary.

captured by what I call love,

which is not much different

from what is called fear,

I follow because I can

do nothing else,

like birds

that hunt water

place to place.

I am no longer my own.

I obey

the new law, incessant

as nightfall

and dawn:

with morning

the sky is colored

like a cactus flower, the land’s

sparse and perfect

culmination.