Excerpted Postcolonial Love Poem

I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite,
Can stop the bleeding---most people forgot this
When the war ended. The war ended
Depending on which war you mean: those we started,
Before those, millennia ago and onward,
Those which started me, which I lost and won---
Those ever-blooming wounds.

There are wildflowers in my desert
which take up to twenty years to bloom.
The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand
until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them
in its copper current, opens them with memory--
they remember what their god whispered
into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.

Where your hands have been are diamonds
on my shoulders, down my back, thighs--
I am your culebra.
I am in the dirt for you.
Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous,
two rose-horned rams ascending a soft desert wash
before the November sky untethers a hundred-year flood--
the desert returned suddenly to its ancient sea.

The rain will eventually come, or not.
Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds--
The war never ended and somehow begins again.

--Natalie Díaz
Postcolonial Love Poem (excerpt)

Eva Cassidy: Fields of Gold Autumn Leaves