Search Results for: Valley of the Gods

Poetry by Patrick Jennings
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Sunrise Over Valley of the Gods, From Moki Dugway, Cedar Mesa, Utah, United States of America

Sunrise Sojourn

I wake
Into darkness
Scramble out of the tent
Enough time to boil water

Coffee
Cereal
Almond milk

The breakfast of
Car camping
Photographers

Pre-dawn
On the horizon
Time to go

Camera bag
Tripod
Fresh brew in the travel mug

On the way
Not far from the campground
Dawn demands a stop
Unexpected glory
In a few hurried frames

Then to the switchbacks
Moki Dugway
Rising twelve hundred feet
Straight up Cedar Mesa

From the top
With the wide zoom
And the fisheye
Then, this one here
On the middle zoom
Expected glory

Deep sigh of success
And anticipation
For the work which takes
A latent image of RAW bits
To the finished photograph
Here

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Poetry by Patrick Jennings
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Falling Away to Depth, Valley of the Gods, Cedar Mesa, Moki Dugway, State Road 21, Utah, United States of America

Falling Away to Depth

The mesa falls away
Into the depths of early evening
Low sun illuminates
Undulating canyons and buttes

Sedimented sandstone
Layers indicating a scale
Powerfully daunting
And exquisite

And I
Stopped halfway between
Floor and ceiling
Sense myself in the centre of aeons

Epochs pass
Every hundred steps or so
Up the trail

A hundred years
A thousand
A hundred thousand
A million

Unwinding time
As species come
And species go

Great, fearsome lizards
Ruled the known universe
For 165 million years

But only in the last tens of steps
Before the top
Do I walk in the footsteps
Of my most ancient ancestors
A paltry 6 or so million years ago

I am reminded
For all our accomplishments and cleverness
We are but toddlers on this Earth
Itself nothing more
Than a pale blue dot
Circling a minor star
Spiraling in an outer arm
Of one galaxy
In a universe dotted
With hundreds of billions

Layer upon layer
Of time and space
Stretch out to scales
Unimaginable

A few steps more
I stand atop the mesa
Returned to the time and place
That belongs to me now

Deep, heavy breaths
To gain my equilibrium
While scanning across the vista
Tallying a few hundred million years of strata

A snippet
In an existence billions of years in the making
Layer upon layer of time and space
To make this collection of sediments
Which seems so very vast and ancient
But is no more than a cosmic blip
In all that was
All that is
And all that will be

I feel small
Fleeting
Insignificant

Yet

Somehow

And nonetheless

Stupendously magnificent

Because in all this immensity
Stands me
A self-aware collection of molecules
Contemplating the inconceivable miracle
That is my own consciousness
Tucked away in some small backwater
Of eternal infinity

Just how fucking exquisite is that?

And the view up here is awesome.

The sun sets
Light falls away to darkness
But for the little beacon of light
That is me

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Landscape by Patrick Jennings
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Giants, Badlands, Drumheller, Alberta, Canada

Giant ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #158

There I stood, at the feet of giants, myself measuring no taller than the smallest of their toes, and standing as high in my own shoes as possible. One giant leaned down, only slightly, though the Earth trembled beneath his shifting weight. He peered at me, squinting, as I would to better observe an insect trundling across my boot. A snort. Dismissive. The earth heaved again as he rose. The atmosphere rumbled with his voice.

“I beg your pardon if this offends you,” he began, it seemed to me, in rather gentle tone for a being known to have bellowed up a hurricane, “but you seem mighty small for something which calls itself ‘King of this land and all the land you’ve ever known,’ some small trifle claiming to command us, the Brethren of the Mountains, as his subjects.” Gentle, perhaps, but not without a significant undertone of malice.

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