If I were a crystal, 
I might be a citrine mushroom, 
holding rain from my face,
or a stone bowl pebbled with malachite 
that collects the rain, 
but more likely I’d lift my
crystalline arms in surrender 
because from earth we came 
and to earth we return, yet 
my heart rings like struck
crystal as I remember
too many gone too soon.  

Copyright 2025 Brenda Davis Harsham

Notes: So much news is sad or baffling, but most especially the campers lost to the Gaudalupe River in Texas. My sympathies to the families, the neighbors, and the communities. I started a different poem for this photograph from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., but sometimes poems take us to places we don’t expect. 

A one sentence poem:

In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

And a quote:

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”
― William Carlos Williams