Sunday, April 6, 2014

THIS ANCIENT MOUNTAIN


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.

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