Dry Creek and a Sunday Song: "Sunday Morning" by Bobby Byrd and "Hymns to the Silence" by Van Morrison

It's July at Dry Creek.  The fields have gone from green to burnt sienna, to ochre.  Heat is heavy, the sun intense in the morning and early afternoon.  Then the thunder clouds build--bold, black and threatening.  Sometimes it sprinkles.  Once it poured.  But usually, it does nothing.

This afternoon I sat on the toilet and read,  "Sunday Morning" by Bobby Byrd. Though a poem, it seemed like the perfect song this week.  It could have easily stood alone.  But, as it called to mind Van Morrison's "Hymns to the Silence," I have also included that, even though the two works only relate the way lines in some poems relate, loosely--image rhymes, one image triggering another.  

Enjoy.

Sunday Morning

Two old guys walk single file
Slowly and wordlessly around a room.
A white curtain filters the sunshine.
Outside is the hot desert sun.

The two men are shoeless.  The smaller,
the guy in front, is limping because
40 years ago in Vietnam a kid in black pajamas
shot him in the head and almost killed him.

The other guy dodged that war,
lived in the mountains, lived in the city,
wife and three kids, drank a lot,
wrote some poems.  A candle flickers,

incense burns.  The floor is clean
because these two men cleaned it.
Three others were here but they left.
The man in front slaps two wooden

clappers together.  The sound startles
the man behind.  He takes a deep breath.
The men stop walking.  The first man
Lights a stick of incense and places it

in front of a statue of the Buddha.
They bow to their cushions on the floor.
They sit down cross-legged and stare
at the wall.  Their legs ache.  It's been

three days now.  Not much longer.
One of them is the teacher,
one of them the student.  It doesn't
make much difference which is which.

--Bobby Byrd

printed with permission from the author

Newly finished outdoor kitchen viewed from the garden.

Rabbit brush and grapevine along front walk.  Mount Catherine in the background.

Sunflowers in Marci's cutting-flower garden.

A bench my brother, Lloyd, built along the edge of Dry Creek Canyon.   He placed it here so our step-dad could still enjoy the canyon when he got too old to walk down in it.

Dry Creek Canyon

"Sunday Morning" is from Otherwise, My Life is Ordinary, published by Cinco Puntos Press.