Dream-groves-gone, ancient remnants in battered ruin.
Gardens hid beneath the sand like imaginings of a child’s mind,
buried by the lush and roll of Northern Plains,
Hesperides, dried by millennia of drought,
Eden’s cool paths are camel tracks, a scattering
of sterile dust beneath the flaming sun,
lands where richly laden garden sites had stood,
troughs where gilded grain, and endless orchards
fed rising species’ need for sacred rites.
Now desert devils roil; narcotic sleep obscures
its secret sights. Oasis forgot, the myth survives,
its progeny scattered like the apple’s seeds.
Cold and heat have intervened, erased the gold, but binds
the image we still hold: that Villain-Snake, the Hero-Heracles.