This ancient
mountain, hundreds of millions of years
wearing down to the
sea from which we crawled,
its towering peaks
lost in unfathomable time.
Did our web-footed
ancestors gasp their first breaths
in reverence and awe when they saw this land?
How could they
not? I stand atop this hill,
entranced as much
by the thought
of what is no
longer here,
as by the landscape
that I can see,
the creek
meandering across its alluvial plain
to the granite
ledges of the Fall Line,
flowing to the
Coastal Plain and then to the sea.
And, you and me, can
we measure our lives as this hill?
The towering
grandeur gone, slipped away by time,
sharpness rounded
to a comfortable slope.
