SUMMER DUST

Summer months are fitted and cloaked

With worthless layers of dusty fabric

Assembled by wind, kicked up by bare feet,

And cascaded by rapid wheels or birds’ wings.

Uncoveted, it collects itself on any surface,

Covers up the appearance of things,

Disguises the wilted and dying,

With a thin, archetypal mask,

Conceals the luster of what had been.

Shape-shifting vagabond, without destination,

Leaves my footprints in the doorway,

Leaves an imprint of the summer’s dry sun

On the deepest well of the collective mind

As I wash it away. 

©cmheuer, 2015

THE TIGER LILY

Wild devotion curbs wanderlust

In a subtle recognition of food left next to

The old fox hole for a feral, nursing feline

And her brood of five. 

Obliged without measure, the mother cat

Staked out the house with patrols

To guard against strays and poachers,

Whose intrusions were met

With Roman back-tail arches and

Grecian serpentine hisses; she

Stalked field mice and moles with

Stealth-drawn, tactical maneuvers carried out

From dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn;

Years of tireless and relentless gratitude,

Unspoken in the margins of a human world

There are unknown civilizations that build

Birthing beds out of the earth and befriend

Strangers who smile and place food at their feet.

© cmheuer