Creator and Created

I wrote this in the spring of 2000, after a weekend in the Ozarks with a good friend from college. We visited a Boy Scout camp, which my friend had attended for many years as a child. Incidentally, it was that very camp that brought my Dad to the Ozarks to work, as he helped to rock the outside walls of the cafeteria. He met my uncle, who brought him home to my Grandma's house, where he met my mother.

I spent a lot of my growing-up days in the Ozark Mountains.

I cry for the mountains -
Taers like streams
Over ruddy, mud-caked stones.
I throw my hands up and lower my head,
My bleary eyes resting on the beauty below -
A river -
Shallow here, deep there,
With fish and turtles, snakes and muscles,
Harmony in a peaceful current of life.
A bluff -
Ancient, looked upon by wise and sorrowful Indians
Their shadows, in firelight, rising on the stone -
By wide-eyed, out-of-state tourists,
By playful, splashing Boy Scouts
All of this - serene - almost smug,
For the beauty belongs only to themselves, river and bluff.

I cry upon a winding mountain road
As I drive alone toward my given hme.
I have, for moments only, entertwined myself in the beauty ,
In the safeness of the valleys and the trees -
My soul will not travel with me -
It will stay,
So I cry -
Almost a lover leaving her beloved,
I must be torn from these mountains,
And know of joy, beauty, sorrow unspeakable -
One has to sit awhile by the river,
look up and down the riverbed to understand,
To have yor heart overflow and ache to leave -
God's own country -
Nothing I can explain -
I can only cry.