Your Reign of Love

The sun beats down, boiling the landscape
into a thick stew of fertile potential, while sandy
pathways wind through mesquite bushes as
saguaros and chollas scrape at the hiker's bare
legs. He dares to trudge along a ridge separating
a sere, summer, waterless gully from the lush
hillside vegetation marking off islands, pockets
of rich habitats where hares and quail scurry,
carefree. But in the gully's dry streambed, lizards flit,
here and there, slurping up insects, ants and flies
while rattlesnakes curl and shake, poised to strike
at any warm-blooded creature passing nearby.

Overhead a lonely Red-tailed hawk eagle-eyes
a ground squirrel and rapidly dives, claws clutching,
talons piercing, squeezing the life out of its prey.
The rays of the sun sap the hiker's lifeforce,
sweating it right out of his pores as he seeks
a middle ground between predatory strategies
of elitist succubae and the quicksand foundation
of the gully's waterless, streambed floor. The hiker
hears echoes of formative suppositions taught
by society's professors of conventional wisdom
in the cries of the hawk carried on the hot, dry
winds over the gully, "Predation is the natural
order of the world." But the hiker dreams
of a spineless cactus, harmless and medicinal,
spiritual and psychoactive, to calm the savage
inclinations of capitalist, territorial barking dogs
expressing their infantile demand, "Mine!" All
they want is to eat everything in sight alive!
Fear induces all living beings into stonelike
catatonia. The searing heat stains the hiker's
skin blood red, cooking his flesh, unseasoned,
for some coyote pack's dinner, sans place setting.

The hiker reaches the summit and looks down,
all around him. Only the hot blue sky blankets
him. The hiker takes off his boots and dons
a pair of mid-calf-high moccasins. He lights
a pipe which exudes a perfumy, peyote scent.
The hiker dons the head of an eagle, and claws
at the sky with sharp, white talons. Then, he spins
in circles, arms extended outward, weaving
about like an eagle on the air, soaring, chanting.
"Oh Father Sky, Brother Sun, Mother Earth and
Sister Moon, I weave the dance of rain before
your eyes, I claw at your skin that you might rain
your watery blood, the liquid of sustenance
on the world before me, and rein in the strife
of brother against brother, allow us all to revel
in the sweet nectar of Your Reign of Love."