Two Poems

by David Anson Lee

Cicada Psalm

By noon the heat
has erased edges.
Fields flatten
under the sun’s thumb.

Soybeans hold their breath.
The creek thins itself,
ashamed.

Cicadas seize the day:
a sound so dense
it becomes texture,
stitched through magnolia,
tin, red clay.

Time drags syrup-slow.
Sweat learns the body’s alphabet.
A tractor idles in pecan shade,
engine ticking
like a heart that refuses sleep.

Nothing is gentle here,
not even beauty.
Abundance teaches endurance:
green upon green
until desire itself grows tired
and lies down in the grass.

High Desert, Late Light

Elevation thins the air
until thought sharpens.

Juniper shadows stretch
longer than the day deserves.
Sage releases its medicine
under the pressure of boots.

Stone remembers
every season at once.
Nothing pretends fertility.

Mountains hold snow
like an old belief.
Below them: rust, ochre, bone.

A raven turns once.
That is enough
to change the silence.

Night comes clean.
Stars arrive in excess.
Cold reminds the body
where it ends.

This is not emptiness.
It is restraint:
a beauty that survives
by refusing
to offer more
than necessary.

BIO: David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet published in Right Hand Pointing, Unbroken Journal, and The Scarred Tree. Born on the Pine Ridge Reservation and now in Texas, he writes at the intersection of landscape, memory, and human perception, exploring fleeting moments that reveal larger truths about life, absence, and the invisible threads binding place and experience.