As furious as your moods, the dry wind
Blasts through bones of the hillside home it shakes,
Finds chinks, slams doors, slaps the raw façade thinned
By anticipation of drought or quakes.

Out of the nowhere, clouds picking up dust
Scatter debris from some previous lives,
Spinning blame across the field, fragments thrust
Like hail, hot-tempered damage by surprise.

With wind-burned nerves like branches bared, leaves stripped,
I sniff the air and brace my frame to broach
The keening sound, on scrub and barbed wire tripped,
To let the whorl pass through, without reproach.

Just as the mountain supports the river
I am shaped by the force you deliver.

-KH