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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Baker Brownell

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

On the Road

Baker Brownell

From “In Barracks”

THE WORLD sweats

In a bedding of throbbing, thick light;

Heat soaks like a bitter oil

Into the texture of being;

Dust steams from the earth

Under the feet of infantry

And coats the air with minute fur.

Along the smothered road men plod

Between silent horizons,

Between thin, yellow borders of the earth

Pressed flat under a burden of light.

Painted, vivid silence

Waits along the desert’s rim.