from All night in the new country

South into the country of lost things

_______________we passed through quiet

villages. The wind sprang up

overnight and some mornings

we awoke as dunes

in a desert of dust. A fine sand blew in

from the north and what of emptied

towns after a year of windstorms:

would the rafters and rooflines

show their spines against

the rising soil? Those years we became

strangers to ourselves and sought the future

in any sign; if the sands

hadn’t overtaken the road

we arrived on by morning,

soon enough the winter rains,

or an army whose trajectory

needed no extant path,

would.

Miriam Bird Greenberg