After the Election We Watch the Super Moon Rise over the Rincon Mountains
The mountains are burning and we cannot sleep.
We light candles at the Grotto where daughters toss the dark braids of sick mothers at
Guadelupe’s feet, where fathers pin photos of the stricken for slivers of miracle, uphill from the
Mission’s dome, White Dove catching sunset’s irridescent wishes in sky biolumenescent as plankton in the Sea of Cortez.
We breathe the dust of conquistadors who must applaud these election results caught
in the tyrant’s clenched teeth calling hate from under the cracked sidewalks of the despised
poor who believe in promises thin as light disappearing at our feet.
The mountains are burning out of control, flames higher than our dreams of peace, eating pine
trees, the hearts of deer, flames higher than the orange-faced despot’s fiery rhetoric of fear.
At hill crest, we sit on concrete losing heat to stark dark taking desert in its irrevocable mouth, sit
stunned despite the stinging bites of the fire ant colony skittering up our invading calves.
Unsheltered, we cannot sleep, see the huge yellow corona crowning, the birth of our moon
closer to earth than its been since our own births more than half a century past.
We wait, women holding tight our arms against news that darkens daily, against the crisp flap
of white sheets, the sneering narcissist chorus recounting rapes on TV. There is nothing else
to do but lean against one another’s sorrow, our disbelief.
We’ve left our candles of hope burning in the maw of the Grotto below to witness
the balm of moon rise while mountain slopes turn inferno sending contrails of smoke
to choke twilight’s last blue song.
Oh, Moon, you are so late, grinding up slow behind jagged Rincon peaks, backlit
with enough gleaming milk to feed thousands of refugee children hunted like rabbits
by our border guards. Have you heard their small bones cry sleepless in detention cells?
We watch wildfires more immense than our nightmares consume miles of ridges, burning past
our history as the super hunter’s moon blesses supplicant cacti offering thorns to heaven.
Closer we lean into our shivering until a blizzard of crushed diamond light breaks
screaming white, striking us blind, cauterizing our battered hearts, rejecting the nuclear
wasps of power and revenge hissing from the tyrant’s tongue.
The moon’s perfect snow glows sharp as an arctic blade slicing open our hopeless arms, baptizing
our faces with reflected light, and we know no tyranny can long last under such scrutiny.
Even in darkness, doves breathe, nestled in sparse mesquite leaves. We recall the canyon wren
displaced roosting in the mission’s adobe eaves with angels that have flown for centuries,
moon-dazzled, drizzled by light bouncing from solar storms translated in their genes.
Moon’s ice white chin lifts for Venus. Mica glitters each of our steps over volcanic rock past
the Grotto’s knotted prayers for compassion, past our long burning candles, navigating treacherous
gravel the color of winter fields, taking us home, beyond any terror or grief.
Political activist Pamela Uschuk has howled out six books of poems, including Crazy Love (2010 American Book Award) and Blood Flower, 2015. She is editor-in-chief of Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts and wanders the Sonoran desert, consulting often with cactus wrens.
View poetry by Pamela Uschuk appearing previously in Terrain.org: one long poem and three poems.
Header photo of super moon rising over mountains by alsen, courtesy Pixabay.
