Spring Squall

Will you look at us now—battered as we stand rigid in our valley by squalls tumbling black over tourmaline, tourmaline over what might have once been a kind of white. The high, snow-gilded mountains have crawled away from around us, surely they have, and rain drives hard into last years ginger grasses. The once open and rolling expanse closing. But the reward, the reward to this sparsely peopled land, once the storm recedes, will be the prancing green of freshened spring, the new bird chanting, the snow and stone mountains gathering us up once again.

--Mitchell Hegman