Spare Me Yellow Skies
by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel
Temperature is 105
high pressure puts
a hateful cap on our
heads
and holds it there
Under a sullen mustard
sky
that will not relent
and weep us rain
My poor house suffers
as much as I
the tiny patio
would gladly move to Pismo Beach
The cactus in Mama’s pottery
jar
has turned to gray mush
and the neighbor
with all the terrible secrets
has not opened her drapes
today
I pull my drapes wide open
and ask myself again
why does a yellow sky
trouble me
I have loved blue skies
and purple
madly
gray and black
I have embraced as sisters
but someone spare me yellow
skies
Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel was born in 1918 into an Oklahoma sharecropping family. In 1936 they fled the drought, dust and the Depression of Oklahoma. She died in California in 2007.
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