A poem by Sha'Tara, local writer and friend.

There is the Desert

a poem by Sha'Tara ~%~

There is a desert: some have seen it
though none ever lived to tell of it;
a parched and pale brown-red tawny beast
its black spear-points as turned up ears:
the many-shadowed sides of ridged dunes
and that oasis, a chromatic glimmering,
in its unreachable immediate distance,
its icy-blue waters and green waving fronds
cries of bottomless, unfulfilled desires.
The desert stretches out in horizontal infinity,
ever thirsty, ever hungry, ever overtaking.
Shape-shifting its emptiness in illusions
it attracts its unsuspecting prey:
its believers, its worshippers,
riding the mirage-making death-breath of doom
under a pitiless sun in ever-widening vulture circles
lasting a thousand years and more.
These riding ghosts of ages past
stare sightless from shadow-black eyes,
their faces tattooed in lines of years,
as the desert sculpts their emaciated bodies
draped in flowing black shrouds
that only the desert can still see.
In a hollow place, and secretly
the desert ate their failing flesh
and drank their steaming blood
long before history was born:
it feasted and licked every grain of sand
of the sweet vanishing moisture
it felt on its scarred and parched face.
This desert will never know
the hunger, the thirst, of another:
not because that's nature's way
(not to feel, not to know, not to care)
but because of its own perverse nature.
Yet in its mindless shame it hides
skeletal evidence of long-ago feasts
under smooth-topped crescent dunes.
and heaves pointless dry tearless sobs
under a mocking pearl-shaped moon.