Explore "Rain in the Desert" by John Gould Fletcher on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The huge red-buttressed mesa over yonder / Is merely a far-off temple where the sleepy sun is burning / Its altar-fires of pinyon and of toyon for the day.
The old priests sleep, white-shrouded, / Their pottery whistles lie beside them, the prayer-sticks closely / feathered; / On every mummied face there glows a smile.
The sun is rolling slowly / Beneath the sluggish folds of the sky-serpents, / Coiling, uncoiling, blue-black, sparked with fires.
The old dead priests / Feel in the thin dried earth that is heaped about them, / Above the smell of scorching oozing pinyon, / The acrid smell of rain.
And now the showers / Surround the mesa like a troop of silver dancers: / Shaking their rattles, stamping, chanting, roaring, / Whirling, extinguishing the last red wisp of light.