Blue Dreaming in the Green River Gorge

Here is my hiking poem which will appear in the Smokey Blue Literary and Arts Magazine (online March 1), with gratitude for the Carolina Mountain Club.

Between the river
and the leaning boulders big as churches,
I walk the trail.
Small stones flecked with mica
speckle the sides of the path
and glitter underwater.
When the river disappears,
her rushing still reaches my ear;
the treetop wind sings harmony
with her quickening over rocks.
Three times I cross a stream and add,
to the trickles and rushes,
my own new pour toward growth.

I nod my reverence
to an audacious arising
of Spring Beauties
and a fragile patch
of creekside Hepatica.
Carolina Vetch begins
its fetching toothy climb.
A Trillium still closed,
pumps up tight
from the center of its tripartite show.
Little Brown Jugs,
hiding beneath heart-shaped leaves
tantalize like wrapped gifts.

A clan of slate-gray tree trunks
marches up a storybook hill.
Through their bare branches,
the quiet sky,
a cloth of soft blue dreaming,
falls gently onto my head.
And all the dazzling afternoon,
glistening flows the river,
glistening flows the green Green River.

© Susa Silvermarie 2015