The Desert's Lip Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Cloistered at the desert’s lip
The nuns reminisce on their daughters’
Reminiscence,
They quiet kiss of boys
They look onwards for the rain:
The mountains rise at the very end,
The promises spoken by dead husbands,
Employers of the failed business
Now they mumble like the torn lips
Of Central American pugilists,
Bleeding rivers in the myriads of life
Consuming life:
The spawn fills the earth
Breeding grounds the extinction of
The drive in theatre-
The tidal seas leave only the dead
Cosmonauts in the recession who exclaiming bearish,
“Why? ” as the mica trips,
The infant falls from the crib
As the house burned so no one knows
It was arson,
But it was already dead.
Yet the clean and dead sorority
Hinges on God,
The flaming cusp of light’s
Turn around upon the sand:
They’ve seen him
Walking miles away from where he is:
They whisper the miracles
Yellow buses full of waving school children
At the desert’s lip.