The Desert Road

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Title:     The Desert Road
Author: Gilbert Parker [More Titles by Parker]

In the sands I lived in a hut of palm,
There was never a garden to see;
There was never a path through the desert calm,
Nor a way through its storms for me.

Tenant was I of a lone domain;
The far pale caravans wound
To the rim of the sky, and vanished again;
My call in the waste was drowned.

The vultures came and hovered and fled;
And once there stole to my door
A white gazelle, but its eyes were dread
With the hurt of the wounds it bore.

It passed in the dusk with a foot of fear,
And the white cold mists rolled in;
And my heart was the heart of a stricken deer,
Of a soul in the snare of sin.

My days they withered like rootless things,
And the sands rolled on, rolled wide;
Like a pelican I, with broken wings,
Like a drifting barque on the tide.

But at last, in the light of a rose-red day,
In the windless glow of the morn,
From over the hills and from far away,
You came-ah, the joy of the morn!

And wherever your footsteps fell there crept
A path--it was fair and wide;
A desert road which no sands have swept,
Where never a hope has died.

I followed you forth, and your beauty held
My heart like an ancient song,
By that desert road to the blossoming plains
I came, and the way was long.

So, I set my course by the light of your eyes;
I care not what fate may send;
On the road I tread shine the love-starred skies,
The road with never an end.

[The end]
Gilbert Parker's poem: Desert Road

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