By Alan Dugan, 1961

Whelped from blackness by a pressure of rocks,
black water rose like breath from the lungs
and bust in speech. It poured its glitter,
trouble, on the sand, and babbled on about
its quick exploits in shape above the plain.
This speaking taught the desert thirst: once
sucked at by that thirster, sand, the water spread
its cool hair over fever: sand was changed:
what was almost sand in sand, the waiting sand,
a hidden seed, leaped up and burst in palms!
The water argued greenery to sand: now sand
is passionate with fruit! Ticking with bugs,
bustling with flowers and death, the garden is
a place and fireworks, a green wild on the calm.

Oh its mirages offer water, figs, and shade
to windrift birds for songs and wings of praise.
Clock-lost nomads, lost in the running sands,
will have to choose, when madness lights
advertisements of water to their soaking need,
if they will drop to the truth of desert, dry
to sand, to run to where the fanfare of quick
water winds their clocks, give place to love,
and lets them drink their living from its deaths.