Poetry

Desert, body,
memory, water.

Poems shaped by weather, endurance, absence, and unexpected abundance.

A Living Page

Poems, Prayers & Words for the Moment

Some writing arrives as a poem. Some arrives as a prayer, a question, a fragment, or a few lines that need to be kept close for a while.

This is a changing page of poems, prayers, and small pieces of writing by Laurie S. Sherman. Come back when you need a new word, a familiar one, or a moment of stillness.

Currently on the page

Rain Rite

Laurie S. Sherman

From the forthcoming collection desert water

Rain falling over a saguaro wash in the Sonoran Desert. — Rain Over Saguaro Wash · illustration from desert water

The first thunder rolls over the house like an old name spoken in another room. Then the waiting air. Then the sharp dark of clouds assembling where an hour ago the sky had been all refusal. When rain comes the whole yard changes liturgy. Gravel darkens. Leaves bow. The dry channels remember their lines. The frogs, somewhere hidden, take up their brief ecstatic office. For twenty minutes the yard speaks in water. By morning the channels are dust again, but the earth keeps the scent.

Forthcoming

desert water

Sonnets and Illustrations

A collection shaped by the desert’s fierce beauty, scarcity, weather, endurance, and unexpected abundance.

Between

Poems

Free verse exploring memory, identity, relationship, absence, and the charged spaces between one life and another.

bloom without water

Poems

Haiku and entangled poems about desert, body, memory, endurance, and the forms of abundance that arise in scarcity.

From Between

Light on the Floor

The light reaches
the floor
and stays there:
a clean shape
laid down
without argument.

It holds
to what it has touched
as if arrival
were enough.

Desert, body,memory, water.