Category: Olympus OM-2

Heavy Rail

Surprised
I am
As always

While steel rails compress
Concrete ties depress
And the ground rumbles
Trembling underfoot

Unencumbered, must I enter
Unattached
Unburdened

Burdens weigh me down
Attachments distract me
Encumbrances hold me back

There are colours in the sky
I had never seen
And patterns in the world
I could never know

Until I looked through a lens
Clicked the shutter
And took the latent image home
To explore the possibilities

Time
And chance
Some physics
And chemistry

All the brushes
Nature requires
To paint with stardust
On the canvas of existence

Beauty in the beholder’s eye
As if we create the beauty

But Nature in all her ways
When left to her own devices
She paints and sculpts
Beauty undeniable

That is just the Way
The Dao, Nature’s way
Beautiful is
All that follows the Way

Nothing affects our perception of living
Quite so deeply as the death
Of someone who became
An intricate part of our being

Insights and memories and loved ones come
But cannot fill the emptiness
A loss of self
Nearly as profound
As the loss of another

From the tower
I frame in the traffic circle
My pickup truck at the bottom
Holding Alcatraz in the bay
Looking so peaceful

As if I’d landed
Billions of years ago
On a planet still young
And restless

When rock flowed as liquid
And the only solid lands
Were granite rafts
Floating on a molten orb

I often wonder
At nature’s hand
Both in awe
And as a query

Artist and creator
Of worlds fantastic
And unimagined
By lesser gifts, as mine

Hoarding precious moisture

Tenacious flora on the floor
Perpetual winds in the sky

Until rare torrents fall
Tumbling down the mountainsides
Muddy brown and rocky