Slate grey sky
Slate green sea
Ancient conifers
Snuggle up to the rocky shore
Recalling, perhaps
Distant ancestors
From a primordial ocean
Even I can imagine
With my scant sixty years
From this perch over Boiler Bay
Tag: time
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
The Changing Sky
From a high vantage
Late in the afternoon
Or is this early evening?
An in-between of light and tone
Like my mood
I scan the roads
Which took me here
Now and in the past
And again perhaps
In some near or distant future
Far below
Moving slowly
Or so it seems
Scale and time
Diminished by the distance
Carloads of people
And luggage
Expectations
And dreams to be
Fulfilled or dashed
Some approach
Some recede
All have, or will
Round the curve below
Before, or after
Passing behind me
On the switchback’s final curve
Some stop
Unload their occupants
Who join me and the gentle breeze
On Cedar Mesa’s rim
To bask in changing sky
With quiet wonder
Grand ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #323
I stand upon this grandest rim
Try to imagine unthinkable time
Relent before too long such fruitless task
Instead I’ll contemplate this lazy little rhyme
Through the plateau
The Colorado pickaxe falls
Reveals sedimental sandstone rings
The eons marked on canyon walls
Rock bottom finds the hardest rock
Twelve hundred meters down below
There an ancient granite shield
No deeper can the river go
But wider still
The river’s reach
A force of will
The cliffs be breached
Upstream the river
Has not yet found
The basement rock
So burrows still into the ground
Gentle Tenacity
I remind myself
Even the gentlest creeks
Carve canyons from bedrock
With the aid of time and tenacity
Infinite Rhythms
Finite tracks traverse
Infinite space and time
Every passage a new road
Every road a new story
Played out in the rhythms
Of dashed lines and power poles
Where even the vanishing point
Vanishes
Into futures unexplored
Will of the Wisp
My presence in this moment
Is but a wisp of a cloud
In a windswept sky
A drop of rain
In the eons of torrents
Which gouge a canyon
From a plateau of stone
Try as I might
I cannot grasp
The monumental meaningless
Of my own existence
Leaving me to acknowledge
The incalculable significance
Of drawing a single breath
Here am I
An infinitesimal ephemeral wisp
In the cloud-strewn sky
Of existence
Claiming my glorious place
In the magnificence
As if a passing moment in eternity
Were eternity itself
Beauty in Stone
Gentle lines
In weathered stone
A beauty marked
By time
Patinaed, etched
Distressed
By life and the elements
Beautiful all the more
Cadence ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #301
The world moves
In its own time
And I in mine
A dance
A rhythm
Obstinate
Relentless
Cadence
Unique
To my mind’s
Perceiving
And should I not exist
To observe
As sun surrenders sky
To the stars
Would there be time
At all?
Lost in the Fog
The monuments we erect
To assure ourselves
Of our own greatness
Barely breach
The lowest cloud
Of nature’s modest creation
While the proof
Of our existence
Is a contrail adrift in time
Dissipating in the empty sky
Of infinite space
Pix to Words 