The Dunes

Far as the eye can see, in domes and spires, Buttress and curve, ruins of shifting sand, In whose wild making wind and sea took hand, The white dunes stretch. The wind, that never tires, Striving for strange effects that he admires, Changes their form from time to time; the land Forever passive to his mad demand, And to the sea's, who with the wind conspires. Here, as on towers of desolate cities, bay And wire-grass grow, wherein no insect cries, Only a bird, the swallow of the sea, That homes in sand. I hear it far away Crying or is it some lost soul that flies, Above the land, ailing unceasingly?