SageGreenJournal.org
voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary
Dale Harris
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Dale Harris has made New Mexico home since 1993 when she and actor/chef husband Scott Sharot settled near Mountainair. They opened the popular Hummingbird Café where monthly Live Poets Society readings attracted a multitude of visitors. Its success led Dale to organize the Sunflower Festival Poets & Writers Picnic and Writers’ Workshops at the historic Shaffer Hotel, annual events that continued for fourteen years. After moving to Albuquerque, she edited Central Avenue monthly poetry journal and hosted the reading series from 2002 – 2007. Dale was associate editor for the Malpaís Review poetry quarterly from its inception until it ceased publication in 2016. She is an organizer for the annual Poets Picnic at the Open Space Visitor Center in Albuquerque, an event that includes haiku submissions from New Mexico poets displayed on Weathergrams created by Escribiente calligraphers. Her poems are widely anthologized. Her poetry books can be found at:
and her poetry with music is available at
Late to Grace
In my lap a tin pan filled
with oranges, strawberries, plums,
the first red cherries from our backyard tree,
such abundance!
I feed you as we drive through Española,
Ojo Caliente, pass roads to Abiquiu and Chama.
We are making for Colorado,
a possible future there, money in our pockets,
land for sale we can maybe afford.
We talk about how bright our lives
blessed by this marriage, how we came
late to grace after painful earlier times
in other cities, with other lovers.
Weather is moving in from the west,
lifting topsoil off new ploughed fields,
a stingy rain mixed with blowing dirt.
Antonito, Alamosa, Hooper, closer now to Crestone,
we turn east, lift our eyes to the mountain,
bow, climb its rock face with our minds.
Almost there, the rain at bay,
we traverse fields of yellow lupine,
see a pair of eagles light down to share a kill,
surely a good sign.
Late to grace, we arrive.
2 poems by Dale Harris
Cibola Winter
Winter is amnesty.
There is the forgiveness of snowfall,
a clean white drape
over the rough New Mexican landscape,
covering the beautiful and the not, indiscriminately.
In the little Spanish towns along the Salt Mission Trail
snow is drifting against the crumbled adobes,
piling atop the rusted-out cars in cluttered yards,
restoring them to grace temporarily.
On the nearby prairie
cholla cactus become a manger scene.
They kneel in knobby clusters
playing the parts of Shepherds and Wise Men
who await the arrival of the Blessed Child.
If it is Christmas Eve,
luminarias, paper bag candles, line the country roads
lighting the way for the Messiah.
They are a gesture of hope against the dark.
Families bring them to graveyard too
making a path to their beloveds.
For those whose grief is not too fresh
it is a nearly cheerful, almost social scene.
They are kind to each other,
these people related by loss,
call out greetings and news
as they lean over homemade headstones
and rough-cut crosses.
For them the cemetery is a large garden they tend,
blooming plastic, fantastical flowers,
messages of resurrection in punched tin.
There is an older festival
remembered only in the bones.
At Solstice the snow swirls a special way.
The Goddess is dancing her veils.
If you are a foolish traveler
late at night through Tijeras Canyon, beware!
She may invite you to be her partner,
entice you from the road,
spinning you around and around on the black ice
in a dangerous fandango.
Waken in the safety of morning
to a world made seamless white
by new snow, hoarfrost on shrouded pines,
a pearl colored sky.
It is the inside of an egg,
waiting to be pecked.