VESPERS IN THE BARRENS [Very early draft]
Men’s insatiable digging rendered
this landscape bare for decades.
But now the jack and pitch pines festoon
the floor with their brown paper needles,
their rigid brawny cones.
I’ve walked these paths for thirty years,
paths where black bears check
my intentions before snapping to
attention, bolt, and sprint
through the understory, over paths
on the hills carved by the full ferrous might
of Carnegie and Thompson,
trees as a legacy just an afterthought.
Today I surmounted a steep hill,
looked over the verge of the pit.
Vertigo took me as I stared into the abyss,
a carved out womb for purged ore
that fed the bearded gentleman’s beasts.
I fell to the ground, consumed
by the complete assurance of your death,
certain not of its imminence, just its
inevitability. So I put my hand into the
sandy centennial loam and rubbed
the needles between my fingers and prayed at
vespers for the first time in twenty years.
* * *
This is another in my poem of the day series that I share on Facebook. You can backtrack through the posts or use the tag “Poem of the Day” to read previous entries.
Peter Walks for Democracy 