tain or the sea. The bleak hills impressed me with their austerity and their strength. A critic accused me of having too little color in my desert, but I could give it only as I saw it. Recently, in a book by Dallas Lore Sharp, I came across this description: 'Not split by time and space, and free from all change, single, deep, indelible gray is the desert from Bend to Burns.' I was glad to find this re action long after my own had been put on paper." She was born in Nebraska but came as a small girl to Denver. She was graduated from the Colorado State Teachers College at Greeley. After a year of high school teaching she was married to Dr. William E. Hedges, a Chicago physician, and lived in that city until they moved to East ern Oregon. From 1923 to 1930 they lived in Portland, then for two years in Los Angeles, and since then again in Portland. Mrs. Hedges wrote her first poem, in Latin, at the age of 17, and had her first poem published in the Overland Monthly in 1912. From that time on she has written occasional verse, which has been published in American and English magazines, but for the past five years she has given most of her time to writing short stories. Several times she has renounced poetry with a gesture, but it won't stay renounced and always comes back.
Desert Spring From Desert Poems, 1930
Across the sunny slopes will soon be seen,
Close in the wake of winter's lingering chills,
A trailing mist of thin ephemeral green.
Through this transparency the hills will be
Unmoved and grim, in scorn of compromise
With spring's brief carnival, inscrutably
Disdaining all her garments of disguise.
In frosty dawns the desert larks will pour
Their reckless flood of song upon this wide
Indifference^ while under skies too clear
Old junipers, more weathered than before,
Grow wistful as they stand unglorified,
That May is but a shadow passing here.
15 BERT HUFFMAN
Bert Huffman has been called the poet laureate of Eastern Ore
