Challenging Poetry

desert fire

once, I saw the desert burning,
saguaros black and ember red
against a smokey sky,
and I turned my eyes
away, closing them against
the wrongness of it, closing them
against flames blowing by
on tumbleweed, ashing the
gray green of the sagebrush, turning
the sands gray and dead,
but behind my closed lids, I still
saw.
         that lightning struck
landscape still haunts me. like the
taste of ashes. like the smell of tears.
like the unexpected crunch
of a dead bird under my toe.

line count: 17
April 27: start a fire