The Arid Land by Rollie Lynn Riggs

The Arid Land

by Rollie 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.

I took the photo above in November, 2022, outside of Nashville, Tennessee, on one of my many cross-country drives. This is a black vulture (we usually balled them buzzards here in the US) on top of a dumpster behind a Starbucks; I was in the drive-thru getting ready to get on the interstate heading back to Oregon.

I tell you this because I love this photo and wanted to use it here. I searched "buzzard" at the Academy of American Poets and the above poem came up. I had not heard of this poet which I am shocked about for a few reasons, one of which is that he wrote the 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs, which became the musical Oklahoma!, one of my favorite musicals (after 1776, Fiddler on the Roof, The Music Man, and Oliver!).

Riggs, whose mother was Cherokee, grew up on the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma. He spent much of his adult life elsewhere, including New York City, New Mexico, Chicago, and France, which is where he was living when he wrote Green Grow the Lilacs.

Unlike the feelings about the southwestern US in Oklahoma!, this poem's take is a bit harsher. The language is telling--not just what the words mean, but their harsh sounds: crooked, circled, and creep all have hard c's. Each line in this poem depicts a landscape that is beyond desolate.

Although we are still in a place devoid of anything pleasant in the last stanza, we get a bit of a surprise--"we yet may love"--as well as the last line. "So sunny" in most other contexts would be a pleasant image; after what has been described, however, the sun here is baking the land and making it difficult and even impossible for things to live.

This poem was written long before climate change (Riggs died in 1954 at the age of 54 from stomach cancer) but it seems to speak to what we are going through now.

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with this poet, playwright, scriptwriter, fiction writer, and painter. He was a fascinating person in all respects. Wikipedia tells us "Riggs was homosexual and was often a non-romantic escort for Hollywood actresses including Bette Davis and Joan Crawford." The Oklahoma Historical Society recounts his painful childhood. Sooner Magazine has a photo of Riggs with a guitar, as well as a self-portrait and a portrait of Riggs by another artist; the article also tells us he is often referred to as "Broadway's Forgotten Man." Gay Influence mentions that his friend Joan Crawford gave Riggs a Scottish terrier as a gift.

This poem is very bleak, but the poet makes clear this part of the world is also loved. That speaks to any of us who have loved a place, a person, a (fill in the blank), even though that entity is harsh, ugly, unloveable, and/or not good for us. It is one of those crazy human conditions we share.

I hope you will come back on Wednesday to see what other poem I am able to unearth between now and then. Until then, check out earlier poems I have posted here. I did not write commentaries for the earlier posts (although I am half-heartedly trying to go back and do that), so you are on your own for those! Enjoy!