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awe of arrakis
* For Frank Herbert and that little paperback book I pulled off the prep school library shelves fifty-three years ago - that, along with Asimov’s ‘Pebble in the Sky’ and Clarke’s ‘Childhood’s End’, literally changed my life. *
~
footfalls …
soft in the desert
like a savior on the sea
or a waxwing on whispers
the dunes carry me
quiet and quick
with only plodding pocks to betray
or cursive glyphs attesting ‘the walk’ …
the sands are my trundle -
drifts, my pillow
keeper of all dreams
but with twilight come the tempters -
the jinn …
to tickle my ears with
ballads, beguiling
astucious stories meant to
leaven the loins …
but falsehoods are falsehoods
no matter their smile
I bury them in the morning
with my leavings
and bid them to the spiders …
tossed like flotsam on
an endless ocean of sand and dust
I have drowned in the deep of
it’s chill gloaming
and awakened to the
shy dance of a binary sunrise …
but now -
now the barrens are bleeding
I see the red gold dazzled in the
bright of two suns
(and the edacious eyes of men) -
midday occlusion swinging from south-to-north
like a two-headed axe dividing the
desolation and the bounty, bled
every gust stirring both -
reminding me just how trivial I am
and how precious my gaze …
if only my veins coursed with
such rare color
I would paint the day with crimson
and end it with indigo …
I would bury the melange in a tomb of time
unkept and unknown
and the sacred source would return this
hot hell to a boon of
beryl breath and fronded fealty -
hearkening the Gardens of Semiramis
the only prize worthy a
king or consort …
or even the spice-bringers themselves -
the great and gargantuan
the origin and the age
the bane and the
blessed beastly bosom …
Shai-Hulud.
Copyright © 2025 Gregory Richard Barden
( photographic art created copyright free by the author with Gala AI software )
Copyright ©
Gregory Richard Barden
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