'Still Moving'

( for Rev. Bob C.)


This land doesn't know who walks on it. It cannot feel.
The mountain is indifferent to hooves or feet,
to wily snakes, to butterflies, to calculating spiders
and their reluctant meals,
to sweating climbers toiling upward on its flank,
and, indifferent to, by the roadside, the mangled deer
still moving;

The busy creek, finds its way anew each moment,
talking only to itself, as it moves -but doesn't move-
down the hills and hollows;
The wind, gentle or fierce, -seldom calm- from West or North,
unknowing, whispers, shouts, or howls to no one in particular
-not even to itself;

Even the birds -the cardinals crows et al- that live and die
their birdly lives all around my own brief life,
feel nothing (in whatever hearts they have) for you or me;

The little cemetery near my house, under The Buffalo,
beautiful, still, serene, holds its tiny piles of mostly ancient bones,
not sad, it can't be moved, nor will it ever be-
and desperate tears that watered it in 1930, '56, and '63,
-those intermittent anguished mornings- now are gone;

The long-dead mountaineers, the farmers, woodcutters, whiskey
makers, mid-wives, violent men and tired women, barefoot children,
and one special man of God -all dead, silenced,
dissipated molecules, and buried sacks of bones,
only their names remain, on aging, time-worn stones;

This place, beautiful, uncaring, cold, indifferent,
one would be a fool to hold it dear,
-only a fool holds foolish sentiments; and yet,
long-past struggles, laughter, triumphs, tears,
babies crying, all the chestnuts
dying, dying;

The oxen, the guns and whiskey,
the frolics, the sickness, poverty, and pain,
the sly courting of eager lovers,....
the preacher's little toils of love,
all the life that lived here once
seems like it could happen once again,
as if to see them now one turns a switch and, 'there!'

as in a once-dark room, all this...
still moving.

-jorge999