High Plains Manifesto
We can be mountains of love in the mist of despair
and lead the broken reeds of men
who rise each dawn from corporate beds
bent by using and the using up,
stretch our limbs like spans of rope
to bridge the miles of difference
between those who have no vision
and those who see too much.
We can be mountains that echo
drumlins and eskers leveled by glaciers
so Guernseys can be captured by clover,
we can be psalmists for prairie dogs,
the black bear, goose, and the badger,
berries and waxworks on wires of unworked acres,
we can be a winter night when a billion stars
cannot heat the coldest dollar
but inflame the weakest heart.
We can speak mountains of words,
not words as solid as rock,
but words which lift the spirit
like a mountain takes up vision
from the desert floor,
words that raise like farmers
erecting barns born like a phoenix
from the ashes of the old,
words that grow, root and germ, impregnations.
We can speak ponds of green understanding,
speak easy as sepals and pistils to the bee,
pliant as pine to the carpenter’s plane,
as full of beauty as a field of wheat in the wind.
Clerestory Poetry Journal 