no cars, no trucks on the road this time of night. it’s almost midnight and the nightbirds call across the dry leathery grass, across the dirt burned by the harsh sun of day.
even the beer joint is desserted. no honky tonk music wafting through the hot night, no slap of fists as the fight spills out into the gravel parking lot, no cussing, no crying, no retching out the last four beers.
a soft breeze rises from the south, rises to meet the night, rises to cool the scorched land. the stirring air carries away more of the day’s heat, cooling the prairie grasses, cooling the dry, hard, cracked earth, cooling the nocturnals moving into the night, living the pulse of life as they are meant to live it.
in the southern sky the clouds loom like great pillars of god’s cathedral, heat lightening racing up and down the billowing columns. they slowly march their death march across the night sky on their way to oblivion for it is always oblivion for them, victims to the cooling earth that robs them of the heat force they need to survive.
night brings a peace, a respit from the burning days on the plains, a quiet that blankets the land, a whispering silence that yields to the sounds of the night, yields to the stars tracing their paths across the sky’s blue black spanse. the quiet deepens as the night deepens leaving only room for the lonely cry of the whippoorwills, the distant call of the owl.
the night sleeps