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November 5, 2023

The Arid Land

Lynn Riggs

There will be willows plunging
Their bloodless roots in air
And the hard crooked flying
Of buzzards circled there.

About the treeless wastes
No sand may ever heap
With water, nothing will run
And nothing creep.

Arid, desolate, defiant
Under its iron band
Of sky, we yet may love
This so sunny land.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 5, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“The Arid Land” appears in Laughing Horse, no. 14 (August, 1927). In “Laughing Horse Magazine and Regional Modernism in New Mexico,” Daniel Worden, associate professor in the college of art and design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, writes, “The three-stanza poem moves from a description of the desert as a place of death and waste to an affectionate, if hesitant, recognition. [. . .] [Lynn] Riggs does not romanticize the landscape. Instead, the landscape is recognized as a hostile wasteland, but there is nonetheless something to ‘love’ in the desolation and defiance connoted by the arid land.”

Rollie Lynn Riggs, born on August 31, 1899, near Claremore, Oklahoma, was an American poet, playwright, and screenwriter of Cherokee descent. He is best known for his 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs, which was later adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein into the 1943 musical Oklahoma! He died on June 30, 1954.

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Thanks to Steve Bellin-Oka, author of Instructions for Seeing a Ghost (University of North Texas Press, 2020), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Bellin-Oka’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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