“dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains / and there’s no end in sight”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday:

“I walked in a desert,” Stephen Crane

I walked in a desert.
And I cried,
“Ah, God, take me from this place!”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”
I cried, “Well, But—
The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”


From his 1895 collection The Black Rider & Other Lines, published when he was 23.

---L.

Subject quote from Sprawl II, Arcade Fire.

Comments

[de_eekhoorn]

Well, that was me to the library direct.

[larryhammer]

My work here is done.

[pauraque]

I don't read much poetry but I did read the entirety of The Black Rider & Other Lines when I was in my early 20s myself. The short and intense metaphor-scenes really spoke to me.

[larryhammer]

His other collection, War Is Kind, is very much in the same manner. The title poem is uncharacteristically long.

[sovay]

The title poem is uncharacteristically long.

I have to check if it it's in the collection of modern poetry that belonged to my grandmother, because I read it for some reason as a child and it haunted me like Robinson Jeffers.

[larryhammer]

I’ll have to check which, but I’m pretty sure it’s in one of the Norton Anthologies.

[sovay]

“dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains / and there’s no end in sight”

Great, thanks, mental music for the rest of the evening set.

(I had not read that Stephen Crane and I like it.)

[larryhammer]

You’re welcome.