IMG_1230Tucked into a cleft in the rocks
It’s raining hard.
There’s thunder
Echoing down the canyons

Ricocheting off the steep granite cliffs
The firs, happy in the rain
The stream chanting, reborn
And I, well

The thunder rolls into me
Grabs and shakes me off the mountainside
Rudely wakes that part of me
That is alive in the true way, the old way

That’s indifferent to soft beds, that
Relishes the bark-fragment-needle-sticked-
Pine-coney ground
That smells of wet trees

That comes out shouting
Like the thunder
This wet skin, and the wild one beneath it,
Know they’ve come home

Ears never happier than hearing sticks crackle
The drop of rain drop, and the rushushing water
Over tumbled boulders
In the canyon

My friend is near
His presence pleases
A region of my mind or body
Near as old as the stone
Knowledge of kinship, felt understanding

Impulse deep-running, shared delight
Drinking life in, gulping beauty
Wise-old and foolish-young

The rain still falling
Granite bones poke at my flesh
Kin, too, here in my nook
Cleft in the rock

Garth Gilchrist

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