Yangtze Blues

Updated from original posted in 2012.

Deep in the highlands of Hubei 

wild torrents cut through gorges

carved in mists so long ago. 

Today the tamed river languishes 

caught behind a concrete slab until

released 

                to wander ancient river plains 

        stretching out on black earth flats 

    below the rolling orange groves        

        past cotton patches 

            flooded paddies 

                down through lands 

                        of grit and coal 

                            by tollway roads 

                        to concrete rows 

                    in cities of ten million

                        souls – new centers

                            that were built 

                                    to sparkle, broker 

                                            fortunes, beckon

                                        dreams and draw

                                    beleaguered masses 

                                forward, soar 

                                    into a gray-brown 

                                            skyscape, lined 

                                                with cranes 

                                                    and belching stacks 

                                                    that stitch the land 

                                                  and sky with smog 

                                                sealing earth 

                                            beneath the load 

                                        of human progress. 

                                    So the modern world goes 

                              as Gaia sighs and sets her gaze 

                        to wait upon a wiser world

                of sages and keepers who care 

        for her creatures in ages of Edens to come.

Voice of the Whirlwind

 “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind” – Job 38:1

Who is this that disturbs creation? 

Who cracks the bonds of matter 

    and classifies the rubble? 

Who samples the dust in the deserts of Mars 

    and light from the edges of time? 

Who reconstructs the eons of Earth 

    and numbers its mass extinctions? 

What kind of creature could tinker with cells 

    and play with the blueprints of life?

You who’d grasp the tragic fate 

    to recreate the world, gird your soul 

to grapple with angels and demons inside 

    while I test your pride with questions. 

Where were you when I lit the stars 

    and forged primordial galaxies? 

Were you there when I molded the sun 

    and chiseled the moon from molten Earth? 

Tell me how you trapped the gas 

    and tamed the Hadean greenhouse. 

Did you summon the mile-high glaciers 

    and guide the conveyer of continents? 

Could you construct a living cell 

    and craft new kingdoms of life? 

Then engineer an Eden 

    to nurse emerging souls? 

So you’ve mastered the tools of logic, 

    teased truths from tangles of facts, 

captured the core of koans 

    and woken new worlds within.

Can you follow the heart of compassion? 

    Are you able at last to manage your soul? 

To bear the eye of awareness 

    and share the tumult of time with me? 

Across the long ages, I am 

    calling you out of your childhood.

Will you grow beyond your grasping 

    and nurture the world with me? 

Will you one day call me ‘companion’?

By Michal Maňas - Own work, CC BY 2.5, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=647900

The Prophecy of Rocks

The rocks below you cry aloud …

The solid ground you stand on floats.
Foundations of your cities shift.
Beneath the crust the mantle stirs,

a seething churn of mineral stew
tracing circuits, trench to core
and back again to seafloor ridge

extruding mass from ocean vents,
paving plates with new basalt.
You ride on granite arks

above a superheated sea of ore.
As Earth rocks quarter billion year beats
continents glide around the globe

on an endless crustal contra dance.
Laurentia, Baltica, Siberia, Australia
diverge, divide, converge, collide

and cluster together again and again.
Nuna, Rodinia, Gondwana, Pangaea –
supercontinents always split.

Oceans are puddles that open before us.
We’ll bridge the Pacific inch by inch,
lurching west through quakes and jolts

that topple your ruins, shred the remains,
and bury the bones of your species’
descent beneath a supercontinent –

Amasia looms a beat ahead.
Earth rocks quarter billion year beats.
Foundations shift beneath your feet.

… and mock your brief dominion.

Supercontinent Amasia in 250 million years

To Be In England

for Sarah and Alan, Maggie and Willa

May in the South is a mellow affair – 

how I fling open windows and breathe in the night, 

how scented air soothes my skin, 

how my house exhales. I let go my grip 

and sleep with whispers that drift on the breeze. 

I wake to the calls of cardinals and wrens. 

The back deck beckons. 

I take my mornings outside 

where titmice and phoebes sing through the trees. 

I crumple up my do-list, 

place my age on pause, and waste 

whole days dreaming. A gentle rhythm 

settles in as new life quickens. 

These are the weeks when springtime matures 

and I would not leave them lightly. 

But I would fly four thousand miles and more –

To be in England when elderberry blooms, 

and dog rose decorates embankments. 

The England of greenswards, copses and hedgerows, 

of white lace flowering the shoulders of roads 

that carry me back to my daughter’s home 

to slip on the role of grandpa again. 

To bask in a baby’s toothless smile 

and feel the strength as she squirms for her mum. 

To match wits with a cheeky toddler wielding 

a mischievous grin. To watch her tussle 

then cuddle with dad. To embed in the bustle, 

the banter, the tears, the staccato exuberance 

of playgrounds and parks. To be the old ‘grampa’ 

rolling a buggy down paths by the willows 

to a bend in the river where cygnets hatch 

and hew to the wake of an elegant swan. 

As nights chase days, my weeks slip by – 

One morning I rise, home to gardenia 

beginning to brown in the blaze of a summer 

come too soon where I find myself just 

another elder again wandering the aisles 

of Kroger foraging for what I forgot. 

 

A Dream on Reading Bartram

Sometimes I shut my eyes and see 

a Southern piedmont stream run clear 

from the misty heights of the Cherokee 

through woodlands of Muskogee Creek. 

In dreams I hear the hymn of rills 

that whisper from the ancient glades.

I wander with Bartram through shadowy vales 

and breathe again their sweet perfumes. 

The hills are robed in Delphinium blues 

and white wavy mantles of mock orange shrubs. 

There on the banks of a hidden brook 

where vapors condense into crystalline drips 

we savor the fragrance of sweetshrub flowers 

framed by the flaming azaleas of May. 

When I wake, his world has gone 

from forest paths to asphalt streets 

where English ivy creeps from lawns 

to strangle tame suburban trees. 

Now Chinese privet crowds the sills 

of silted rivers, clay-stained creeks, 

and kudzu casts a tangled shroud 

across the red, eroded hills. 

You needn’t wonder what he’d think if he 

could only see. Beloved, what should we?

A Humble Petition

Give me winter, for instance, 

when the chilling wind finally stills 

and frosty nights grip the hills of Georgia. 

Set me on a rustic path 

that winds beyond abandoned barns 

through broomsedge fields of tan and amber 

walking with my once-young family 

trailing happy farmhouse dogs 

to picnic on the distant ridge 

of weathered granite strewn with boulders, 

lichens, moss, and soft grass beds 

in the scent of a hidden cedar glade. 

Then ease me into early spring 

when bloodroot bloom by woodland streams 

and toads sing love from lowland swamps, 

or the day before the canopy closes 

when nature paints an Impressionist scene 

in tender greens and textures of red. 

Put me on a front porch swing 

where a ceiling fan slowly stirs 

another lush midsummer evening 

soaking my bones in moist heat 

and watching children chase fireflies 

as twilight sinks into night. 

Grant again a golden fall – the grace 

of richness tinged with a pensive mood 

when crickets turn a plaintive tune 

and a choir of blackbirds sings adieux. 

As hickories fling their dried-up leaves – 

the faith to fly with the freshening breeze. 

And when my seasons end at last 

as seasons will, I only ask a year’s reprieve 

to taste of life again, again. 

Bloodroot, Memorial Park. Image by Don Hunter

Bloodroot, Memorial Park. Image by Don Hunter

Winter Clarity

Bright cold blows thin, piercing
the surface, sweeping the chaff, 

clearing out the unfit things.

Winter is a harsh gardener – it culls 

the unworthy, the weak, the worn, 

so only the strong survive to spring. 

You see greenbrier, grapevine, 

and pale stands of privet choke 

the lowland in frozen profusion.

I layer up and step outside. 

A bitter wind stings my ears 

and cracks my skin. My spirit numbs. 

As cold sun cuts a flawless sky 

I shrink beneath the frigid glare 

that pierces my pretensions. 

Call me old and weak, unworthy, 

soul of dust and wind-borne chaff, 

but I am an agent of nature as well, 

so I root out the privet 

and free a green fern 

huddled in bottomland duff. 

Beneath brittle forms, 

behind the dry tangles 

abundance bides midwinter’s embrace. 

Tree fern, image from Wikipedia
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=202078

When I Heard the Learn'd Cosmologist

(after Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer)

When I heard the learn’d cosmologist, 

when animations flickered in windows before me, 

when shown the shape and scale of space unspooled by time, 

when images rendered by silicon circuits from a distant gold-plated lens 

sated my screen – how soon my soul burst, unbound, 

till rising I took to the crisp night-air, 

and gripped by a vision, peered through the darkness 

between the stars and saw the dawn of time. 

Pillars of Creation, IR image by NASA,  ESA/Hubble team

Dominion

At the dawn of dominion a dark-eyed youth
slips from her hovel through mud and dung
out to a pasture of silence and stars.

Driven by visions she’s cursed to proclaim, 
she enters the city set on the hill 
and cries out to the uncaring crowd – 

Dominion is a stone facade 
with cedar beams and paneled walls;
it’s frescos lining marbled halls. 

Dominion is a court of laws 
with ornate scrolls of holy codes 
and tablets carved with harsh decrees. 

Dominion is the gift of grain 
backed by chains; dominion 
is the sweat of slaves. 

Dominion is a fortress, walled, 
its storeroom, bare, its cistern, dry; 
dominion stares with hollow eyes. 

Dominion is a city, breached, 
the stench of streets 
pooled with sewage, guts, and blood 

and pierced by shrieks of wounded youth. 
It’s the wail of old women 
and the silence of a starving child 

scavenging the ruins of rude huts. 
Dominion is a broken plow 
by a field sewn with corpses. 

Painting by Jean Mielot, canon of Lille, 1455. 

Image and description are from "Jerusalem" 

by Michel Join-Lambert. Elek Books, 1958