John N. Miller

Desert Song

The desert song, calling,
Its voice enthralling . . .
--Sigmund Romberg

From a distant mound
humpbacked on the sunset-flamed horizon,
they emerge as silhouettes
gaining shape and size

as they draw nearer in full combat gear,
with gas masks strapped over body armor—
a small detachment, lost, from a battalion
out in the desert somewhere

near their skeletal, charred Humvee.
Sloshing ankle-deep through a mirage,
features shadowed by their helmets'
front rims, camouflage

uniforms the color of pale sand,
they lose distinctness as crepuscular
light falls on them. They pause,
breathless in the dusk, aware:

Surely some revelation is at hand,
a pillar of smoke, a tongue of fire,
a dull explosion. Then they hear it
keening ever higher

from one quadrant of surrounding dark:
their desert song, a siren calling,
piercing through steel and into sand-plugged ears.
They take up arms again and follow.

Though born in Ohio (1933), John N. Miller grew up in Hawai'i (1937-1951), received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University, retired from college teaching (British and American literature, creative writing) in 1997, and now lives with his German-born wife Ilse in an elegant geriatric ghetto (“retirement community”) in Lexington, Virginia.

He and his wife are inveterate travelers, especially to Europe and Hawai'i, and spent the academic year 1990-91 in Duesseldorf, Federal Republic of Germany, where he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Heinrich Heine University.

Over the past half-century his poems have appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, and recently two small presses have published modest volumes of his work: Second War in Hawai'i (March Street Press: Greensboro, North Carolina, 2005) and In and Out of Their Elements (Fine Tooth Press: Waterbury, Connecticut, 2006).