A Story We Have Forgotten

Sarah Webb

May 25, 2022

Dust. Children who cannot remember their parents,

their gods toppled, their tongues broken,

vagrants, begging their way among strangers,

a land lost, a people lost, dust on the road away

dust chants their story: canals gone dry

as wind singes terrace and field,

wells turned bitter and rivers blue-green,

seed unsprouted in spring

dust, a rebuke for storehouses emptied,

the rich still fat and the peasants hungry,

collectors trampling on high-mettled horses

though the people have nothing to give

dust, a cloak of rumors—of men in the hills,

hunts without meat and the fires gone cold,

of wolves come down in the black for a sheep

or a horse, or a child in a house without light

dust, warning of plague flags, of cargoes burned,

of a clerk in a high-up window who gasps

as red-sailed galleys file into the harbor,

bowmen and shieldmen bristling the prows

dust and death—fear shrilling at

torches and horsemen and blood in the night,

a boy who stumbles away over furrows

rags and fur against ice-filled wind

dust that whispers—of climbing to secrets,

of rites to placate, of arms hidden,

bands in the heights, tents onto rock,

night falling, sleet falling, silence.

Sarah Webb splits her time between a lake in the northern Hill Country and Corpus Christi. She will soon go on the road with her new rescue dog, who is learning to be brave.