Dry earth,
its sharp teeth
tear through trunks,
spines spindle around nature’s tenacity;
this rugged rage of rocks that have rolled,
boulders are the big bands here
spotlight of sandy sun bolts
and center stage dawns
of desert dust.
Dry earth,
cutting clouds like carefree-cotton
fall apart amid the peak-like pinnacles
that places people as unimportant pebbles,
we can climb the heights, we can slip our soles
along the sandy tracks others have thread
but a simple sandstorm leaves us
as a mark once made,
fast forgotten.
Dry earth.
Still. Silent.
Shining. Steady.
Bare breath is borne off on the breeze,
beauty is breath taking where the breath is less
and beauty is everything.
Steady. Shining.
Sill. Silent.
Dry Earth,
but so relentlessly
resilient.
All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly
Photographs taken last week in Joshua Tree National Park, Yucca Valley, California
Damien B. Donnelly 
Resilience is the word. A harsh landscape.
“Rugged rage of rocks that have rolled” – love that! Here in NZ we have so many of these. Rocks and boulders all over the place from various calamities. Plenty still precariously perched waiting to roll down. Occasional injury and fatality when someone is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Certain places we drive through I’m just glad to get out the other end in one piece!
The desert always strikes me as completely alien. What must the first explorers have thought when they came upon it? and yet, resilient, life survives, even thrives. (K)
So true, even today standing within all its vastness, it’s almost impossible to comprehend it, it’s on a scale that defies measurement and a dusty dryness that belies how vegetation can thrive there