simonhlilly

UPLANDS

1 (Near-eternal rules)

A perfect sky.

My tangled, old hands

forget themselves.

The valley dreams of the uplands and

The uplands dream of heaven,

and sing it so.

Easy it is to breathe its names

In the luscious sap

of hidden streams.

Easy it is to forget, though,

how to remain there,

Discomforted by continents of swelling air,

The sweeping veils of rain,

the unlikelihood of easy paths,

and how the weighted body

Yearns for flight

and how all thoughts always turn back

To the curling, dreaming bracken

and sullen silent stone.

The harsh gods gravitate here,

Born of flesh and born again,

with their horns and thunderheads.

Mud-spattered,

they hew and heft,

carve deeply the near-eternal rules.

Their language, as guttural, as singing,

as the falling crevices’ echo.

As the waters do,

melting away long millennia,

shaping bodies for breath

and for joy.

The deep folds of a planet’s shifting dream

Upon whose hunched shoulders

All the little things thrive.