The Sweltering Forest

As dawn creeps in lifting the shrouded
forest from its nightly silence a cardinal
trills to welcome the sun into yet another
sweltering day of humid heat and windy
gusts riffling the tree tops while chickadees
and nuthatches call and flit endlessly among
the trees. Bees focus on gathering pollen
from blooming bull thistles and dragonflies
float through the atmosphere on this
midsummer day not yet settled into the
searing heat of the rising sun with few
prospects of rain to break the stifling
atmosphere. The creek bisecting the
forested ravine runs low and slow, few
within its clay bottom to speak of aquatic
life where Damselflies yet linger suspended
by a shimmering thread of expectation.
The gloom lifted in the forest confines the
sun blazing overhead unable to penetrate
and send its fiery fingers to the forest floor
but it illuminates the canopy in a dazzling
display of brilliance, set to bake the day
into a crackling, dry ferment of torrid
stupor, de-energizing vegetation sending
all forest creatures into life-preserving
shelter of shade as the sky's furnace bakes
all things within the vulnerable landscape.