Ronald Edwin Lane was educated in Botany and Forestry at Humboldt State University in Northern California, and for the past eighteen years has been involved with teaching and research for the Plant Sciences Department at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Avina’s Song, and his poetry and prose have appeared in Blue Moon Literary & Art Review, The Yolo Crow, The Rattlesnake Review, and Medusa’s Kitchen.
Ronald Edwin Lane
Where
Will They Land?
From a bed of dead grasses
and invasive
weeds
limbs of
cottonwood trees
thirsty
climb
from the confines
of the parched earth
that cracks at their feet
like the fissured columns
of their twisted trunks and limbs
like drunken
old men
shaking fists
full of dollars at the bar
but the bar's
closed
And the river
that only
months ago breathed
and furiously
threatened to drown and pull down
and to carry
out to sea
has since bled
into the earth and fled
into a creek
a shadow beneath the flutter
a flutter
no longer
dollars in hands
but
butterflies testing the wind
and pulling on
stems
that bind
their feet with flattened petioles
stems that
then pull on limbs
that pull on
trunks
which pull on
roots
that root for
the butterflies
to uproot them
from this hell
so
they may fly
into
the sky
to drift
like the cotton
from
which they began
and
...
