Copper and Oranges

We are at the far edge of all time — by our own measures, The farthest forward we as human beings have ever gone.

We are citizens of a place centuries and seconds old, This desert, which was a desert before names, this Arizona.

We are a single house of whole lifetimes and new lives, Many languages and 22 nations, hard geography and brilliant sky.

We are native and immigrant both, so many of each, So many from faraway places, Chicago, Guaymas, Calgary,

So many who never moved at all, guests of the land every one of us, Squeezed into the rattlesnake’s hiss and the saguaro’s long, long yawn

At the thought of us. We have lived with yellow flowers and brown cows, Centipedes, June bugs, roadrunners and neighbors from Omaha.

Beauty has clothed us, trouble has found us: big canyon and border wall, Turquoise and thunderstorm. We are desert and pine, hot and cold,

Copper and oranges. Added together — and though we don’t know how yet — They make possible the surprising solutions for a next decade.

The desert is an act of the imagination, so much still to be filled in, So little ready-made. We have worked to fill spaces like this with cities. But that model is old. Let us build instead a boulevard of better selves. We know we can conjure energy from the world around us.

Do we find hummingbirds beautiful? Let us keep them. Let us help them. Do we find reading useful? Let us grow it. Let us harvest it.

We are the sky that covers us, the ground that suffers us, The dreams and the buildings and the imaginings they give us.

Let us be hungry for what’s coming, for what’s next. We are all citizens of the future.

We can, we must, we have no reason not to be resolved To fix the broken and build the day.

Who we are is small, but what we can together do is without boundary. And here we are. As the cicadas sing and the cotton breaks ground,

As the sun settles for the night one last time this decade,

It will rise for us to a simple newness, though the javelinas will not notice.

The true legislators of our lives, the clouds and their mercies, their voyage Over the mountains, the heat, the dream of rain, this desert life.

Let us move forward on purpose with purpose, Knowing we come from, and have learned from, today.

Good night, and good morning.

‘We are citizens of a place centuries and seconds old,’ Arizona’s inaugural poet laureate writes in homage to home state

Your Turn Alberto Ríos Guest poet