The Echoes of Zion

 

Being there 

 

in Zion …

 

The Navajo sandstone of the canyons

imperceptibly seeped into my soul,

leaching out the bitter penny candy

and dank cramp water trapped there,

replacing my dime store sins with

the virtue of angels.

 

They live there,

the angels who are rocks, expanding

toward us, expanding us from within

unawares. 

 

Rose red rising in morning sun,

inhaling quartz clean air, the embracing cliffs,

now more saffron, now more muddy garnet

resound in my bones. My eyes track the

shear walls of geologic goodness and awe,

feeling along the smooth faces and clefts

like a flat hand soothing a gentle, sorrel mare.

 

Was I really there in the midst of nature’s

priests and priestesses and did they not

fill me with unsingable songs and rapture me

with their petrified prayers? 

 

All glowing ivories, pale beiges, tawny tans,

pinks, peaches, chili pepper reds, vermilions,

mauves, ochres, umbers, siennas burnt and

unburnt, all standing tall in giddy blue of a

fall heaven. 

 

Raising my horn to them,

they spoke their noble hues back to me

reverberating the sacred words of creation,

shouting salvation through the vast valleys

and over the Virgin River that carved them.

 

Ether and earth meeting atop the shoulders of

abstracted colossals of desert stone.  

 

Zion. 

 

Unmatched in grandeur, peerless

In their expression of the divine on earth,

my memory of Zion could not find a place

in my mind at all.

Instead, my heart traveled back there and wonders

unceasingly at the sanctified earth and stone

that point us forever home.

 

 

 

October 28, 2010

Taos, New Mexico