American Poetry
Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.
Like the shark, it contains a shoe.
It must swim for miles through the desert
Uttering cries that are almost human.
Poems on the topic: desert
Poems on the topic “desert” on Poets.by.
Song to the Lost Ones
Soft thy feet on the floor of the desert,
In the night —
Running —
Desperate and breathless.
Blood on the sands of the desert drying,
Drops of blood on the hot sand drying,
Blood from the veins of my beloved
Pouring out on the desert.
Soft in the night the rustle of corn leaves
Young men into the cities pouring,
Blood from the veins of young men pouring into the cities.
Songs About Life and Brighter Things Yet XXIII
The ostrich lives in foreign lands
And trots along the burning sands,
And when from foes it would escape.
It hides its head — the silly ape!
The Answer
O, my feet have worn a track
Deep and old in going back.
Thought released turns to its home
As bees through tangling thickets come.
One way of thought leads to the vast
Desert of the mind, and there is lost,
But backward leads to a dancing light
And myself there, stiff with delight.
O, well my thought has trodden a way
From this brief day to that long day.
Omega
The fragile fabric of our dream
Drifts as a feather down life's stream
The long defile of empty days
Grim silhouetted, mock my gaze.
Though oft escapes the stifled sigh,
A desert ever broods my eye —
Since you have utterly forgot,
God grant that I remember not!
The Cup
As a hot traveller
Going through stones and sands,
Who sees clear water stir
Amid the weary lands,
Takes in his hollowed hands
The clean and lively water,
That trickles down his throat
Like laughter, like laughter,
So when you come to me
Across these parched places
And all the waste I see
Flowered with your graces,
I take between my hands
Your face like a rare cup,
Where kisses mix with laughter,
And drink and drink them up
Reading a Letter
She sits on the recreation ground
Under an oak whose yellow buds dot the pale
blue sky.
The young grass twinkles in the wind, and the sound
Of the wind in the knotted buds in a canopy.
So sitting under the knotted canopy
Of the wind, she is lifted and carried away as in
a balloon
Across the insensible void, till she stoops to see
The sandy desert beneath her, the dreary platoon.
She knows the waste all dry beneath her, in one
place
Stirring with earth-coloured life, ever turning and
stirring.
But never the motion has a human face
Nor sound, save intermittent machinery whirring.
Descanso
Beside this wooden cross
By the cross of the desert cactus.
The coffin-bearers rested:
"Pray for the soul
Of Manuel Rodriguez,"
And remember
That death is the end of life.
Three Men Entered the Desert Alone
Three men entered the desert alone.
But one of them slept like a sack of stone
As the wagon toiled and plodded along,
And one of them sang a drinking song
He had heard at the bar of The Little Cyclone.
Then he too fell asleep at last,
While the third one felt his soul grow vast
As the circle of sand and alkali.
His soul extended and touched the sky.
His old life dropped as a dream that is past,
As the sand slipped off from the wagon wheel —
The shining sand from the band of steel,
While the far horizon widened and grew
Into something he dimly felt he knew,
And had always known, that had just come true.
His vision rested on ridges of sand,
Dust-whorl
The wind picks up a handful of dust,
And sets it down —
Faint spiral of lives
Lived long ago on the desert.
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