NATURE POETRY

Biking Through Hot Sands

While befriending my surroundings

Photo by Mark Tulin

Along the Palm Springs bike path, I trek
through arid land,
wealth and modernity —
hummingbirds like butterflies
dancing before my eyes,
parting like the Red Sea.

A coyote, Wile E.
stares for a moment
before scampering into the shrubs
and leaving his mark on a yucca tree.

Clusters of gray rabbits,
scampering in sweet innocence,
not to be eaten for a stew
or the luck of a rabbit’s foot.

It is a biker's paradise, I see
in this ocean of desert heat,
the sea of dusty winds.
It is a rattlesnake journey,
I undertake in the hundred-degree.

I breeze past the cooing songs of doves,
the gravel roads of dirty lives,
past towering anthills
the size of pyramids
where pharaohs were buried alive.