Water Falls - a reading (on YouTube)
The journey begins in stillness.
Leaves swirl in mirror clear water,
Suspended in slow-motion time.
Their descent begins as they trundle over the top.
They follow the path borne out before them,
Carving out grooves and paint pots,
Conforming to runnels and deeper channels,
Eagerly gushing from the witch’s cauldron.
Stair-stepped water courses
Over a tumbledown mountain.
Whitewater noise pours
From terraced tabletops.
Its conversation clings to
The principles of physics,
The tighter together,
The faster it flows.
Meditative pools feed
Slowly gurgling discourses,
Drifting from babbling isolation
To an animated roar deep within.
The downward flow
Cannot be halted,
Divisions emerge,
Faults and fractures.
Rivulets separate,
Sluicing down the rock face,
Foaming at every obstruction,
Reconciling only at the base.
After a brief midlife respite where
Back eddies trap the leaf boat coracles,
The current recaptures them,
Forcing them toward their eternal fate.
Water finds a way, an easier path than ours,
Generations erode one flaw to etch another,
Wearing away the rock like a worry stone
With the relentless repetition of their lives.
The current rushes by unchanged until,
Like all our tumultuous stories,
All too soon its journey’s done.
A chill relief hangs in the air.
And like distant echoes of
Murmured conversations,
Only as you emerge do
You begin to understand.
© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III
© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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The third poem inspired by our 2014 driving trip to N. Georgia. Our secondary goal was to tour all the nearby waterfalls. The Georgia Parks Department had a really great app listing them along with a number of other features you can search on. Some of them seemed a bit reluctant to be found but worth it once they reveal themselves. We saw at least seven on that run. This piece is a combination of impressions from all of them.
The spelling of the title is purposeful.
Picture Notes:
ReplyDeleteCane Creek Falls was tough to find. We missed the turn the first time we went looking for it, so only after a little hunting did we actually find it. I liked this image because of the different ways the water cascades down the falls, as well as the angle of the rock layers on the left side of the falls. A very peaceful place.