Persophone In The Desert Poem by Meghan O'Rourke

Our fears are often irrational.

One hot afternoon, I toured the old prison for POWs.

(In this desert there are no people, only facilities for holding them.)

One doesn't think of the Underworld as being bright.

But it's possible to live in the desert, under that big sky, that sun, as if you were
belowground, surrounded by barracks, under watch.

I watched a film of a Becket play. I love order, Clov says at one point. It's my dream.

A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the dust.

In the desert there is order. All the prisoners were silent and still and in their places.

And then you know what. The blisterfire bombs, shudder-thuds, floodlights, dazed
cracks, canines.

Of course, this chaos is their minds.

They lie on cots the long, hot afternoons, and paint murals

of what they see out their windows. It's this detail I find so—

Imagine drawing what lies just outside your window: humps of nothing, dun-yellow
needles, flat vulture sky.

We must accept who we are.

Proust said, The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in
having new eyes.

When I dream, I dream that my mother was never frightened for me.

In the painting at the house I stay in there is a film being shown, a celluloid film.

A child asks for more. Then she's leaving the orphanage,

a suitcase in her tiny hand, a box of food, a waiting train.

She is rubbing her eyes, trying to see, and my mother

is rubbing her back, warm hand on bone.

No one is thinking of the land they left behind.

We're all painting the desert before us. Look:

the dry scrub the yellows and blues the walls

crawling with spiders ranch-bit roadkill and ocotillos

the dead eyes of cactus needles