“Desert” by Sarah Brown Weitzman

Sarah Brown Weitzman

DESERT

Bare as a page
the straight road ahead
scrub brush alongside
patches of cracked ground
drying to dust.
Nothing fertile for miles
of arid thinking.
Days of this same terrain
up the Baja.
Weeks of this notebook
on my lap
blank as the land.
The border tonight
and customs.
Nothing to declare.

—from Rattle #14, Winter 2000

__________

Sarah Brown Weitzman: “I began writing in 1977. After having over 200 poems published, I won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1984 and stopped sending out my work. I don’t know if there was a connection. I started submitting my poems again in 1999 and am finding it’s cold out there.”

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