West Texas Sunset

From dust, to dust of withered green surrendered
to wind and heat and cold to gray horizon.

Heat, light, energy, being - dim,
dying whispers of life in spreading darkness.

Nothing given.  Nothing, for anything, offered.
No exchange of light for light,

Nor any return, for my desperate heat of pain
and sweat and effort, offered with
pale and trembling hands to a deadpan, silent plain.

Then, with the spin of a silent orbit,

Light bursts, bleeding red, and orange and yellow
of joy and life and desperate longing,

Splashed across a sky that drinks in,
sings out, shouts out at last,

As its purple-blue torrent of tears
Washes over a plain of parched and dour solitude,

While rises and falls and strips of bleak highway throb
and sing with gold before the leaden gray of twilight.
And my hungry eyes, starved for color and hope,

and for a song of pulsing, heart-throbbed life,
fix on the dying colors of light,

And stay, and stay, and wait, and watch,
As if standing sentinel over a loved one's last breath.

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