How Crumbs Travel
a selection of poetry
My few travels have managed to whet the creative appetite, yielding poetry and stories, such as below, in which we traverse the natural wonders of the American West. With such ruminative studies, the underside can be revealed, not through sudden, startling revelations, but rather through quiet contemplation, gently peeling away the layers.
And please, submit to me your own tales of the underside! Tell your writer friends, your creative pals, your reading circle chums. Reprints and misfits welcome! And if you need greater incentive: the more I receive, the less likely I will need to post my own writings.
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Grand Tetons The lakes were there, I am sure, as mirrors in the pocket of a mountain range, ready to flip open and view themselves, brush away a stray stone, apply a shadow of mascara beneath a watchful summit. They are in this way not prideful but like women. It is not a vanity, but an assertion of one's appearance, and the distinct responsibility that comes with beauty. These women, however, have no need for dancing or lowering a line of sight. Their valleys were deeply visible already, but it was the peaks that had us all enthralled. Time was their benefactor, not their bane, and the pocking of a thousand-thousand rains served only to slough away what didn't belong, to remove, like a sculptor, what was never a mountain to begin with, leaving only her. They say plates shifted and crashed against each other, and the rent drew high into the air, until one plane set upon the other. The inexorable erosion of space compares to how, when she sits next to me now, I can see where her wrinkles tomorrow will be and know, like those mountains, beauty is revealed in facets, in layers, in years. --as seen in Touch: The Journal of Healing
Grand Canyon Sandstone in the west is hard enough to build with. That was the first thing I learned, followed by the fact that fire was burning out the only point where the Colorado could be seen from the north rim, and they allowed it to burn. That was news to me, that wildfires could be a good thing, could clear away the brush and deadwood. Again the music would play, something by Radiohead, or a lonely piano, and the canyon would open up on either side, extend for miles. I could examine the strata in the opposite wall, look for consistencies, recognize the various rocks and how they got there, because that was the third thing I learned. Later I found that a child fell from the very place I hurried past, the neck of the pathway too thin, the handrails too flimsy. That should have been me, lit up like a torch, sparking into the night and riding the long way down to the canyon floor, a burning stump of deadwood or a shooting star. --as seen in Autumn Sky Poetry
Redwood and Sequoia
Gentle giants, they were called by some,
but could you be sure of their benevolence?
The power to blot out the sun intoxicates
even the clouds. Someone once spoke
of giants in a land of mere men, but I wonder
if we have it backwards. Perhaps Steinbeck
had it right when he wrote of mice and men,
and somewhere along the way we forgot
which was which. Even their skeletal remains
were too large to wrap a human mind around,
and what a seed can become, and how
somewhere out there is a sapling that will
wither and die, and we can weed it out.
Thanks for traveling with me, and be sure to send me your own creations!
Leave a comment in the threads about what famous landmark should receive this treatment next time, and what could be said about it.