Blue Agates Poem by Armadillo Poet

I give to her a gift;
wrap her feet in lizard skins:

'Their scales keep your feet cool
through the day and dry
throughout the nights'

'Why would you wear sandals at night? '

The journeyman has often told my mother
as she searches between the desert agates
of walks across the sands:

Sometimes a great man urges
that all his host traverse the expanse
and of course by lack of water are forced
to march both day and night.

The Prince and Princesses: are garbed
in satin veils and feathers;
are led by the desert people
who walk with feet-blistered-rough
unerring to well and oasis
carrying with them in sun-stroked leathers
eye-glass and prisms-
divining rods
and of course water.

She wonders immensely as
to how they measure the land
by sky across the days
and under the nights.

The next day she comes
to me and shows
what she's brought
from the journeyman:

A pyramid of glass:
in the night it captures
images of stars
and along its axis shows
always to the center of the universe.

One evening it is said,
she walks at dusk
down the hills
and off towards the dust,

Where it is presumed
she is swallowed
sandal first...

But perhaps walking
steadfastly her menagerie
of serpent and scorpion,
she reaches at last
some gathering
where her tears are painted
with blue-stones,
her lips dripping with red-fleshy-fruits,
her hair braided by bone and ancient coral

She is seer of the heavens, sands, ancient-seas,
and sleeps worshiped, wrapped in desert-leathers.