From Penn's Sylvan Lands - from my book IN THE SAME PLACE

It had to have
been early, that he
walked gently
the leaf covered
ground – marsh marigolds
and snowdrops sharing
an infrequent bed
along the water they
had come to know as
home.  The Delaware
shared the only space
they had known
with a man and a
people they did not;

no smell of
phosphates then
in her waters
that lap to this day
on the moss covered
rocks – greenish gold
in the sunlit afternoon.

The moist smell
of loam under leaf
kicked up from every
step and filled
a man with lineaments
and latitudes of his
covalent bond with and
to the land. The canopy –
a roof to tuberous growths
of “sang” and stretching
limbs of sassafras that
golden-ed in the
autumn letting go
of green – was a sheltering
home for deer and bear;
berries and roots, fox and
otters. Today, most know
these things as
myth or photos from
a book or label
of their consuming.
How long, just
how long can a man –
any man – stand upon
the very earth he digs
out from under? Would we
not ridicule a man like that?

How much would
it cost for us to learn
to migrate compassion from
the leaking extraction pipes
of the soul of man? Could the
seepage of understanding and
deliberation poison the waters
of the planet’s skin to a positive
detriment? As crazy as this
sounds to most, should we
not be wincing at the reality
of  the fracking well?

This rock has
been here too long
for me to imagine
its beginning.  These
Appalachians have cut
our home in two and
risen to fall again under the
weathered weight of erosion
and tectonic debris. Billions of
years of measured change
have made and destroyed a
landscape with only wonder
as its ravishing by-product
and disease. This earth
longs for the audacity of
such a man as could leave
only awe in his wake, tender
blossoms of the Spring Beauty
under the fall of each footstep.

The earth has a way of
destroying into beauty; of
decaying into rapture. Erosion
takes what it must
to the bottoms
of the hills for
the furtive streams to
carry to the daffodils nestled
along the winding, lacy
watershed.  The half-life
of a fallen tree is
seditiously displaced
by nutrients and the
alluviation of all sorts
of earth debris that
piles on over windblown
time and buries what is there
to amass pockets of oil and coal
and sediment for the great
day of mountain making
and geologic shifts of
newly discovered tectonic plates.
Our power needs are a
crumb to the monstrous
mountain passion movement
of the lithosphere; our toxic greed
is laughed at by the ability of
life to destroy and remain. Would
a man would arise that took his
place to steer us in a gentle communion
with the music of the spheres, with the
cresting of metamorphic creation,
and the undertow of natural decay.

Sing, Blue Mountain of the rain
carried across your face to the
the tributaries and the waters of
our Delaware. Sing, Hawk Mountain
of the feathers cutting wind across
the tree tops on your soil, mid-air
on their dancing flight of
mating and migration.
Sing, Susquehanna
as the shallows gurgle slowly
over stone at the bottom of
ridges formed in Alleghenian
orogeny. Sing, land
of ancient rivers of
the world; sing, land
of ancient mountains. Call
for the coming of a people
that know the beauty of what
they have. Call for the coming
of leaders who lead toward
healing. When the Ravens
cry at the capital and are fed, when
deer find grass among the Outlets,
then will we have found a peace
with the dirt on which we stand.
The dirt from which
we are composed and
do return.

How long, just
how long can a man –
any man – stand upon
the very earth he digs
out from under? Would we
not ridicule a man like that?

It had to have
been early, that he
walked gently
the leaf covered
ground – marsh marigolds
and snowdrops sharing
an infrequent bed
along the water they
had come to know as
home.  The Delaware
shared the only space
they had known
with a man and a
people they did not;

no smell of
phosphates then
in her waters
that lap to this day
on the moss covered
rocks – greenish gold
in the sunlit afternoon.

The moist smell
of loam under leaf
kicked up from every
step and filled
a man with lineaments
and latitudes of his
covalent bond with and
to the land. The canopy –
a roof to tuberous growths
of “sang” and stretching
limbs of sassafras that
golden-ed in the
autumn letting go
of green – was a sheltering
home for deer and bear;
berries and roots, fox and
otters. Sing again
eagle, sing again hawk.
Drown out the gasping
of our greed.

Bring us back
to ourselves

we are not
so far gone

that we cannot
return.

Bring us back
to ourselves.

Link to the book: http://wipfandstock.com/in-the-same-place.html