Observations in tanka form from a walk that started in famed Placerita Canyon, traveled through a recently burned landscape in full natural recovery, and ended at the “Oak of the Golden Dream”, where in 1842, Francisco Lopez dreamed of, and then found gold, six years before John Sutter in Northern California (the full story).

(I owe the discovery of the Japanese poetical format to Harryette Mullen’s “Urban Tumbleweed, Notes from a Tanka Diary” ).

Kept moving through
cold, sun, wind on winter day
across a charred landscape
old growth oaks black like charcoal
sycamores stripped white, naked

Historical trail
they found gold near the oak tree
by the creek, blind, fooled
by the winter sun glistening 
on the water like a dream
Historical trail
creekside, by the old oak tree
they planted cross, flag 
and deed to claim land 
they then ravaged with fool's greed