I've been reading Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon about his road trips across the US and this poem about one of my own road trips comes to mind. With the price of fuel going up and no end in sight those days of road tripping will soon become a thing of the past and will be nothing more than fragments of history in my personal archives.
In The Spirit Of The West
As storm clouds gather over the Rockies
in Montana and Wyoming
snow blankets the western Black Hills.
On Rosebud Reservation
in South Dakota cold wind penetrates
my bones and red sumac paints the yellow bluffs
where wild horses once roamed.
Farther east cattle graze on the prairie
with dumb cow mentality among alfalfa
and hay bales.
Old ghosts and memories linger
in my hometown.
Seeing family and relatives I hear
the word God spoken again
and find it hard to stay for more
than three days.
Driving west through the night
I cross into Wyoming
heading for the Little Big Horns.
The next day I hike up
to the Medicine Wheel
with fresh snow on the trail.
Cold winds blow and heavy clouds
bury the afternoon sun
as I sit and pray to the Great Mother
for better things to come.
Below Medicine Pass
at Five Springs down in the meadow
the morning sun radiates warmth
after a cold night
and I write a letter to a loved one.
A short trail leads me
to a waterfalls where I listen
to it roar over the canyon walls.
The spirit of the west speaks to me
in many ways-
the many becoming one.
2 comments:
T -
yes, the road trips of the future, the near future, will all be virtual: that is what these new generations of digital humans are being bred for.
your excellent observations will be of historical value, as some the last "actual" physical contact with the natural world. your poems will displayed in a virtual natural history museum, online.
it is happening before our very eyes!
this is a wonderful poem! i can feel the water rushing, and i can hear the cold ghost winds....
may we all have at least one more real road trip before we are deleted!
O
it appears that TW has been abducted by aliens.
how else account for his mysterious
disappearance from his blog?
we can only hope that the aliens are young, blond and female, and that their probings are strictly of a sexual nature, albeit in the name of intersteller science.
perhaps they will return him to earth in the middle of a crop circle, and that he will have a smile on his face.
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