"Poetry isn't revolution

but a way of knowing why it must come."  --Adrienne Rich, "Dreamwood," 1987


Like unto Balaam, whose name I have been misspelling for decades.  His encounters with Moab and Balak, trying to maintain the status quo, is paradoxical to say the least. Two encounters with God and one with The Angel of the Lord seem unable to quell his urge to just have a peek at the moneypile. He did, to his credit, recognize the New Order in the Valley of Decision.

"A woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
she thinks, a map laid down to memorize
because she might be walking it, it shows
ridge upon ridge fading into a hazed desert
here and there a sign of aquifers
and one possible watering hole. If this were a map
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice...

Republished in Poetry June 2012--which presciently or not, contains several poems referring to droughty conditions.  Is this because the 20th Century was such a dry and vapid wasteland, as Eliot observed? Or some other confluence of "variations on the one great choice..."?

For example, "Desert" by Josephine Miles from Sept.,1934:

"When with the skin you do acknowledge drought,
The dry in the voice, the lightness of the feet, the fine
Flake of the heat at every level line;

When with the hand you learn to touch without
Surprise the spine for the leaf, the prickled petal,
The stone scorched in the shine, and the wood brittle;

Then where the pipe drips and the fronds sprout
And the foot-square forest of clover blooms in the sand,
You will lean and watch, but never touch it with your hand."


Whatever be the case, such songs in and of the desert places and places undergoing desertification, do arouse thirst...and the desire for the  Hand of the Holy and for God and the pleasure of God...