The formation of badlands is a result of two processes: deposition and erosion. The process of deposition describes the accumulation, over time, of layers of mineral material. Different environments such as seas, rivers, or tropical zones, deposit different sorts of clays, silts, and sand.

Dear God of Desert
You fill my mouth with your landscape
until I am nothing
but a prayer
of sand.
I’ve got an oceanful of you inside this
cactus skin.

Dear God of Desert,
I can see your time stacks.
One millennia you were all water,
and the next, a thirsty plateau
slowly sculpted by wind chisels.

I witness the same phenomenon every week at the meetings.
People who were once drowning
now gape thirsty mouths at stingy skies.
We are badlands
becoming formless
pillars of rock,
vanishing graceful
back into the earth
one particle at a time.
We are slabs of stone
trying to forget the sculpture.

Dear God of Desert,
we are forever defined by the extinct sea.
No matter how spectacular we become
we are only compressed sediments of sand.

We offer you these cactus flowers,Dear God of Desert,
as proof of our beauty
so that you may continue the drought.

Amen

 

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