Drought

Drought

Tramping feet of skinny cattle

Track-herded, raising dust billows

Between brown, empty fields

The earth, dried and caked

Cracked and baked

Crusted solids parched beneath a searing sun

The glaring, cloudless sky

Fierce and rain-barren

Curses and punishes the land

Withholds its water from the needy

Liquid long receded, unreachable

Deep beneath the surface

Leaving not a thing alive in the sterile landscape

Condemned to a gasping, choking death

In the over-heated breeze

Burned, beaten crops defeated by the dryness

Lie strangled, wispy roots withered

Lifeless, straw-like stretchings

Fingering down between cracks of powdered soil

Exhausted by the struggle to survive

Shrivelled and stunted in the cratered furrows

The ground cries out for moisture

Any drop to slake and quench its thirst

Its desiccated loamy texture

Dirt-crumbled in the empty air

Powdered into shifting dust, drifting into piles

Driven by an arid wind, which whispers as it blows

Copyright Andy Fawthrop 2016