Are deserts desolate and bare,
to you, dear reader of these lines?
Do you fear barren, ravaged cliffs,
deep frowning fissures, thirsty rocks?
Does lack of water or thickening tongue
bring dread when thinking of a place,
where you are alien and lost
on a great plain that never ends.
But there is also beauty here,
a haunting, lonely loveliness.
A stark simplicity of line-
that you must train your eye to see.
Can a great dune of drifting sand,
move in the pictures of your mind.
A shadow picking out the crest
that sports a plume of migrant grains?
The dazzling sun, a brassy disc,
set high and quivering in the heat.
Sucking the moisture from the land,
that lies submissive in its blaze.
But look again and you may see
a clean and passive sleeping giant.
Waiting in sterile purity,
where time is nothing but a myth.
Waiting, why? I hear you ask.
For what can change in that vast plain?
Time stands in silent agony-
suspended till that first warm rain.
Then, one year, those jewels from heaven
fall earthward in a glittering shower.
The dust pock marked by heavy drops
that strike the sand with muffled beat.
A lake is born on lower land,
where once we saw a sandy plain
that radiated mirages-
of pools and palms and minarets.
Slowly the water penetrates –
the soil, that was a barren waste.
To find those seeds which lie in wait
for years till moisture quickens them.
Soon the desert turns to green
and flowers bloom in multitudes.
The crops sewn by the peasantry
grow tall and strong, heavy with grain.
The sun, like Midas in the sky,
Turns the green wheat to fields of gold
and then with sickle and the scythe a precious crop is gathered in.
The threshing is a festival
in thanks for bounty freely given.
The fates of man and beast and land
a stated fact in what is “Written”.
So drums of hide, like tambourines,
are warmed by fires to tune their note.
Which struck produce a pulsing beat,
that must be answered by men’s feet.
Round and round the threshing floor,
men dance in swaying, ancient steps.
Thrashing the grain from brittle stalks,
with fronds torn from a lofty palm.
On and on through evening light
to darkness, ruddy from the glow-
of fires for drums that sound the pulse.
The giants work is done once more.
And now the soil is bare again.
Some places checked like chocolate bars.
The flowers fade and turn to dust
to blow away on sandy breeze.
The drifting sand becomes a dune.
Light sears eyes, off lime stone cliffs.
The simmering plain is there again.
The sterile purity is back.
The desert is not desolate.
It has a beauty all it’s own.
That calls to us, who know its song,
a wailing cry of keening wind.
David Garlick, Victoria, 1986