acadia

Mainely

a clean white sea gull flies by to the left,








a dark black crow flies by to the right,
the hilly forest of winter-hardy evergreen and deciduous around me
is filled with the calls of chickadees, robins, and finch,
and behind their pipings I keep hearing shore birds call,

Maine is elemental and stark this early April,
Spring may be ready to erupt,
but it’s crouched incognito behind countless protective curtains,

wet snow holds on and whitens much of this land,
and drip drips from the eaves,









a cool grey mist settles over us all,

some of the land against the Atlantic coast here
is higher than any hugging the shore
north of deep South America,
volcanic granites and basalts here hold against
countless millennia of freezing and thawing, of snow and rain,
and the land in its forms and erratics still remembers
the crushing weight of the glaciers,
melted but a dozen millennia ago,

up here I seek the sea in what I eat
and in grand views along a shoreline trail in Acadia,









where an oft-visited national park lets us hug the wine-dark sea,
she who can break like thunder upon the rocks,
and who holds a wealth of life below its surface,
as if repressed, like a person hiding his feelings,
feelings which churn and make him so much the richer,

no new flowers or even buds are yet visible,
the spruce is still dark and deep in its green
and a cheerful yellow suffuses the green of the moss in the sun,










our science reconstructs the story of plates and magma,
of global warming and cooling, of drift and collision,










of upwelling and settling, the fall and rise of this land by the sea,
which feels so settled to us, as if denying its real past,
our history reconstructs the story of the earliest peoples here
and then tells of the Europeans who dared
to explore, to settle and to farm--
now there are more here than the land and the sea
can support with their bounty,
I don’t know the future, however, I do know
how much the beauty here tugs at our heart to come visit,

today the bright air opens vistas,
the sky is a brilliant blue,
the horizon pulls us toward it over the bountiful sea,








clouds come in the next day and leaden the air,
so that what I see with my eyes closes in,
what I see with my memory and my imagination opens up
again and again when the sea gulls fly by.












by Henry H. Walker
April 5, ’11