The Salt River valley was green enough then <br />To strike camp and some of us never really left. <br />By the time Mrs Abercrombie had finished <br />Shushing all the oaths and drinking with pay threats, <br />And her six children had issued from their home tent <br />With pretty manners, the tiny harmonium was wheezing <br />On plain Sundays as the new century unrolled. <br /> <br />After a gust of rain the desert sage would brighten <br />A perceptible green, trapping sun like glass, <br />Between Baseline and Van Buren, <br />But in winter sheets of water would slush up <br />The dobie doorsteps to a froth of orange mud <br />That stained legs and hems and rode on boots. <br /> <br />It would be weeks before more cocoa, nails and kerchiefs <br />Blew in on a prairie schooner, <br />But the old Yuma Indian’s calendar stick remembered <br />The party of Apaches massacred by Maricopas, <br />Guests, like MacDonalds, in a strangers’ glen. <br /> <br />Television wasn’t guessed at, greying strained public brows, <br />Nor the Jaycees, but every rodeo <br />Made a welcome change from the struggle with letters. <br />Parcels of land soon went in adjacent lots. <br />Sometimes glass towers seemed to melt <br />In the mirage at the far bend, <br />But a mile was a mile then.<br /><br />Martin TURNER<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/phoenix-museum-of-history/
