Poetry

One of my favorite blogs is Emma Tree.  A blog by a poet from Texas, full of beautiful pictures and words.  There's a lot of Texas in her poems...but you might enjoy them even if you're not from here, or even if you live here and don't consider yourself Texan at all.  In her poems you might even find beauty in the summer heat, the bitter cold winter wind, dead grass on the roadside, wildfires, weeds.  Here's some excerpts of her poetry (links to the full poems underneath).

in this year of loss upon loss upon heartbreak
my hand on my mother's heart as she drew her last breath
this year of drought and shimmering heat

...

 A Moment in Time

the haze of wildfires hung low in the sky

and we drifted under the almost full harvest moon.

...

 the lake: early evening, coming home

i awoke to gray skies and no birdsong,

a breeze that teased of wet possibilites.  

...

counting the days to rain

Her prose is beautiful too...here's a sampling:

...leaves lay like wounded butterflies on the porch outside my front door.  grasshoppers cling to my window screens, as do lizards and moths, and temperatures at last below 100 lure me into the night once again, my old habits also returning.

- Standing on the Equinox

...it's been a summer of heat and wind and grassfires and defensively watering trees and lawns in the face of no rain - but this wind was the edge of a hurricane and it came in and didn't stop.
- what you can't see in this picture: for connie jean, who packed suitcases and waited