Turning Towards Autumn

Los Girasoles de la Acequia (photo abstraction), San Acacia, NM, Sept. 2011

Reflection... makes me quiet. I'm resting (short break from internship), catching up on personal time, hiking, riding, doing some pre-winter cleaning up and clearing out, and resting some more. I've been photographing the change of seasons and today spent some creative time altering a photograph I took during a meandering walk one evening along the acequias down in San Acacia. These communal irrigation canals date back many generations and allow farmers to share the scarce water that flows through this land. As the season turns toward autumn these canals often abound with sunflowers, giving us a last burst of summer color before the seasons of harvest and rest. I bid you all a beautiful turn of the seasons and leave you with this evocative poem from Jimmy Santiago Baca, a New Mexico poet whose words speak to both current events and timeless themes.

Sometimes I stand on the river bank

and feel the water take my pain,

allow my nostalgic brooding

a reprieve.

The water flows south,

constantly redrafting its story

which is my story,

rising and lowering with glimmering meanings—

here nations drown their stupid babbling,

bragging senators are mere geese droppings in the mud,

radicals and conservatives are stands of island grass,

and the water flows on,

cleansing, baptizing Muslims, Jews and Christians alike.

I yearn to move past these days of hate and racism.

That is why this Rio Grande,

these trees and sage bushes

the geese, horses, dogs and river stones

are so important to me—

with them

I go on altering my reptilian self,

reaching higher notes of being

on my trombone heart,

pulsing out into the universe, my music

according to the leaf’s music sheet,

working, with a vague indulgence toward a song

called

we the people.

-Jimmy Santiago Baca, from Winter Poems along the Rio Grande