The State of Nature Poetry

I'll speak for the dumb if I have to.
Why hike, if not to write poems.
Palmate, vetch, campion . . .
such names are gifts to the written word.
And given a kind of song at the end of this,
I'm no longer as mute as my awe.
The age of the forest is no matter.
My youth assumes the consonant of bedrock,
the vowel of running river.
And what can a mountain range imagine?
Not even itself.
Its peaks in the clouds
sit on my slight shoulders.
Its trails would be ponderous
but for the language of my undertaking.
Old growth is new epiphanies.
Timberline is eye-line.
Listen to the pages, ancient oak.
I am the sound of your interior.

Passing Cloud

I watch myself age
in the shadow of a passing cloud.
Death to the child
playing in the field,
suddenly chilled by darkness.
Death to the lover
on the porch,
equating life with light,
heart with blue.
Death to the wise guy,
thinking he can read
the wisdom in the sky.
Death even to the days
just passing by,
the warm rays on the skin
and all that they make up for.
Then the cloud is gone
and I am all these
things once more.
But all these things
waiting for the next cloud.

-- John Grey