Outside, the dust of afternoon,
Above it Ixta, woman-shaped and strange,
With woman’s strangeness in its snow-peaked June,
And woman’s softness at its billowed range.
All half-grown Indians look up at this
With eyes not quite so wide, not quite so black;
Old people thank the Virgin, and they kiss
Her wooden image, but the rain is back
Behind the mountains, and the air is thin,
And on the ground, the dust
Rises and turns, and now the winds begin
A desultory gust.
And down the street a workman takes his knife,
Caresses it, and drinks his pulcue fast,
And puts a wound of passion in his wife
For rains that do not last.
And down the street the barefoot children smile
To hear a woman scream a scream of pain,
They play at being dead. Meanwhile
We wait tomorrow’s rain.
This piece appeared in the Winter 1947 issue of the student magazine Dimensions. Alison Kimball Bradford was the Delaware State Poet Laureate in 1961.