At Phoenix Park in sunny early April, 
winter rains have failed again, and vernal pools 
are dry. Fixed signs advise us Keep to Paths. 
No animals or bicycles allowed. My grandsons 
skateboard in from a half-a-block away, 
blind from repetition to the warnings. Or 
to shallow swales when filled with silver shivers 
from faint storms. The ponds sucked runoff in, 
and sank amoeba-shaped into cupped earth; 
now a yellow tide of mustard blossoms 
rises wild, exulting through the crust. 

All the fresh bright painted flowers tremble 
cilia-like in breeze. The sign I’d rather heed 
reads No despair allowed. In spring’s awkward, 
delicate firsts, all guilt’s allayed–the drought, 
the dented beer cans squashed by revelers 
on the soccer field at night. Here, no clues 
that men wage winter wars in places they call Holy Lands. 
No track of killers’ black hearts, righteously confusing   
gods' names with those of victims, all the while 
urging murder on their peers. No human failures, 
cowardice or hatred, where spring notes 
that men are simply men in all their ignorance 
and self-authentication. 

Here death unsheets with idle tenderness, 
a placid eye to detail as it tucks its charges in. 
Demise of winter, of birds, of aged and ill
humans too; a thousand soldiers here, 
twice as many mothers, young sons, babes. 
We take another turn of light; it’s only life, 
old bones and new, up from the dark 
and then back down in their time, 
with the oceans’ long-wound heaves, 
the rainless clouds that roll from shore to shore. 
Survivors weep and suffer grief of now, 
from which someday they’ll reconcile the day-to-day. 

In the live-oak meadows of Phoenix Park 
yellow-billed magpies strut and cock their heads.  
The Cheyenne see the birds as sacred messengers
for Creator; my grandsons watch them, 
natty black-and-white tuxedoed creatures 
that point long blue-black tails toward the sun. 
Aiming at the shadowy oak canopy, 
where they'll chirp and ratchet songs of nesting-life  
in a place where men’s scrutiny and deeds 
claim no immediate dominion, and sow no grief.