leaf swallows the Smokies
and me and my story when I’m there,
curtains of trees flow over the hills and valleys
and take away our view of the larger
that is greater than us
and leave us with that of the smaller scale,
which I too find greater than us:
a single flower,
the curve of a fern,
the pillar of a tree,
the transformations of a creek,
garden after garden around every bend in the trail,
above the underlying story that geology tries to read,
I write this as I sit in a large grassy field
that spreads all over an undulating treeless mountain top,
smoky grey mountains ring us all round in the background
and, closer in, dark green and yellow green ridges
ring us in the foreground,
up here the world and I feel loosed of limits,
a place for the eye to widen, the jaw to drop,
the pulse to quicken,
sense of self and boundaries to fly out wider & wider,
I feel larger as I sigh
and stretch out word and photo
to hold what I can
of the greatness before me.
by Henry Walker
May 24, ’10
1 comment:
This is beautiful. I especilly love the first part, which could be a poem to itself.
Joan
Post a Comment