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 Contents | September 2001 In This Issue (Contributors) More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly. |
Rough Beast
by Jean Monahan .....  Hear Jean Monahan read this poem (in RealAudio)Don't tell a camel about need and want. Look at the big lips pursed in perpetual kiss, the dangerous lashes of a born coquette. The camel is an animal grateful for less. It keeps to itself the hidden spring choked with grass, the sharpest thorn on the sweetest stalk. When a voice was heard crying in the wilderness, when God spoke from the burning bush, the camel was the only animal to answer back. Dune on stilts, it leans into the long horizon, bloodhounding the secret caches of watermelon brought forth like manna from the sand. It will bear no false gods before it: not the trader who cinches its hump with rope, nor the tourist. It has a clear sense of its place in the world: after water and watermelon, heat and light, silence and science, it is the last great hope, Noah's ark, Virgin of the oasis who brings forth milk under a deadly sky. Year after year it follows the bright stars east, falls to its knees for the lowliest king. Except, of course, when the top lip lifts like a curtain on a mighty sneer. Then you may hear, out of the mouth of that rough beast, the walls of the wide world collapse.
Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; September 2001; Rough Beast; Volume 288, No. 2; 83. |
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