Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

I am surrounded

by sun-baked palm fronds

& lime green iguana willows

on a golden river bank with bronze flower spikes.

I hear Orange-fronted parakeets

with azure eyelids like islands in the sea

screech near fire opal bromeliads.

At the Sea of Cortez

where Mayans & Aztecs wrote their visions

on black granite boulders in feathered fields

with pythons tangled in branches above pictographs

I sense the ancient language

delineating decades of struggles

to work corn & bean fields

to free the land & wear it like a poncho

across heart & shoulders.

Wearing the land like music

in hands, lips & legs,

they treated the dirt like a dance

sharing days with barking dogs in the dust of the road

& greeted each morning like tropical kingbirds,

with a screech at sunrise.

At night asleep in the cloud forest

death ignited their dreams

of opalescent orchids whose beaks like scarlet macaws

awoke the sleeper inside -

the one full of pride in plain dirt

reborn & newly etched each morning.