This New Raw Season

Spring in Utah's canyon country, the land still denuded by winter's fury.

In the dry, sandy washes, bits of green poke up here and there, pieces of branches broken by chill winds are scatted about, a on occasion there a single bloom.

My only connection to the world, a static-riddled radio, brings the news, each day's worse than the previous ones: a village washed away by a tsunami, the countryside devastated by an artificial sun's fury – the Fukushima meltdown – a people, stunned, frightened, in tears.

It seems so far, yet so near, Japan, that small island of a people who love cherry blossoms, who gave haiku to the world.

bent low
from a flash flood –
ancient cottonwood

Note: a revision of a piece originally published in Notes from the Gean 3:1 June 2011.

Image: Evening Primrose (Oenothera caespitosa). Primroses contain multiple buds. Each evening, one bud opens as a white flower, is fertilized by a moth, and by the late afternoon the flower has faded to a pink color and droped, as if weary from a long day in the sun. And the next evening, the cycle begins again with another bud blooming.