The nature of hills

Burned up chrome

Aspiring to the high plains

Sun glare drowned in the surface

And black flows after rains.

In the small valleys

Evaporating levels of dry lakes are

Steep, heavy, dark and bitter with the deposits

A thin crust lies over the area

The wastes to the sand shows the sculpture

More storms scar them

And the desert edges are famed at last.

A hill expects to depend upon

For they are slow

Here the hot death rolling where always

A heavy dust

Whirling into the earth or called for violence

Lost in love, yet visited inevitably

If not so little of it.

 

From: The Land With Little Rain by Mary Austin