Just before dawn, stand in the cool desert.

Eastward, a dark butte protects you from

the light that soon will strike. The oblong moon

hovers, waning, in pale silver sky.

Walk, and your foot crunches the gravelly earth,

loud in the silence. But then it isn’t silent,

is it? Before and behind you birds make music.

Skinny lizard skitters ahead of you. Farther on, a soft young cottontail

disappears into the rattlebush.

Wend between the sticky green leaves

and furry-globe pods of creosote.

Meander past a cactus called “cholla,”

whose clenched red petals open like fists in sunlight.

Short fat barrel cactus bristles with needles

bent like fishhooks. Over all the brush

around you, all the prickly pears, saguaros

Tower. In the west, the sun first strikes a rocky slope,

where green-gold columns glow. Here, in the low

shaded path, scarred and needle-ribbed,

their torsos loom, dark in the light-hot sky.

A woodpecker disappears into a hole

high in Saguaro’s side. Hungry nestlings

cheer inside their cool cactus cave.

You stop. You listen. You wonder at the vast

family of giants, some whose arms reach high

in the endless sky, some whose arms swoop down

to you, offer a ring of white waxen flowers

for you. A month from now, these blossoms swell

in heat to crimson sticky seed-filled fruit

for Saguaro’s beloved Tohono O’Odham,

children of this bright and shining place.

You also mourn the fallen within, beyond

this blazing miracle. Saguaro ribs

and netted cholla bones blanch and molder.

Still you send the peace of dawn to grieving

corners of the wounded earth. Here,

now, you listen. You are small. Protected

by giants, can you hear a keening and

a cheering in your cave, your scarred and healing

Heart?