DESERT Poem by Andrea Cote

The land that water never wished to touch
is the desert to the North growing like a desolation of light.
But the men that have seen the wilderness
- its uneventful breadth -
know that it is not true that the land is parched out of a whim,
or without any kindness,
that it its way of showing
that which goes by without us.


2

It is for the god of the uninhabited
that invisible temples are raised
in the commotion of the desert.
It is for him
that the dwarf trees incline in the sand
their humble, fervent
branches.
It is so that you do not cling to yourself
that there exists a god of absence
a lord of the desert
that knows
that as the shadow
there are things that exist
by the strength of a light
that abandons them.