Vermillion and crimson emerge around me
With an unceremonious grandeur
Some like daggers, jutting into tumultuous sky
Others stay flat, the tabletop mesas
That had invited thousands of lives before mine.
Those who left behind their homes for me
to contemplate, centuries later.
The sun makes her way west,
illuminating the peaks and ridges.
Flares of gold strike through red dust.
A storm lingers on the other side
And I hear thunder and see streaks
of lightning and rain.
Clouds and the sun battle over the canyon bed,
the aftermath of war a spinning array of color.
Below me the canyon lays vast and deep
as it has for millions of years before any of us
and as it will when we are gone.
When we are ashes and dust and forgotten
the red will remain and still reach for the sky.
Dina Klarisse 