I can imagine someone who found <br />these fields unbearable, who climbed <br />the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust, <br />cracking the brittle weeds underfoot, <br />wishing a few more trees for shade. <br /> <br />An Easterner especially, who would scorn <br />the meagerness of summer, the dry <br />twisted shapes of black elm, <br />scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape <br />August has already drained of green. <br /> <br />One who would hurry over the clinging <br />thistle, foxtail, golden poppy, <br />knowing everything was just a weed, <br />unable to conceive that these trees <br />and sparse brown bushes were alive. <br /> <br />And hate the bright stillness of the noon <br />without wind, without motion. <br />the only other living thing <br />a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended <br />in the blinding, sunlit blue. <br /> <br />And yet how gentle it seems to someone <br />raised in a landscape short of rain— <br />the skyline of a hill broken by no more <br />trees than one can count, the grass, <br />the empty sky, the wish for water.<br /><br />Dana Gioia<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/california-hills-in-august/
