My America

I love road trips. We have not been on one for a bit now, except for forays up and down I-90 between Rapid City, and St. Paul, Minnesota. My husband and I love the feeling of the landscape unfolding as you drive a solid black line between destinations. Our last road trip was down into Abiqui last Fall, we chose to run the length of the Owen Valley of Colorado, dropping down into the Valley of Abiqui in all the glory that is a New Mexican Fall.

This a poem I forgot I wrote on one of our earlier forays. It seemed a pertinent time to remind myself what my America means to me, beyond the blaring inadequacies and blundering rhetoric……..

From an Oregon Campground-Heading home

This is my America

These hills, these valleys, these lonesome highways

These abandoned houses alone in sagebrush fields

These gray ominous clouds, laden with their strum and drang

Thunder and lightening

These discontented wheels driven by time and distance

Rutting the landscape, rusting in forgotten farms

This is my America

Faces carved in granite

Memorials to our leaders

Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt

Crazy Horse

Memorials of stone and bronze

Greet travelers in pioneer graves of faces unknown

Echoing their dusty quiet goodbyes as you leave their town.

This is my America

Horses swishing flies in belly high grass

Buffalo grazing fenced beside cattle lolling

Lone Pronghorns alert to danger

Jesus rays spotlight sandstone cliffs

Above ancient rivers, eroding buttes, meandering streams

Heading to the sea, to the sea.

This is my America.

Lonesome, harsh, indifferent

A world all unto itself

Steeped in perennial contemplation

Wind, water, heat and ice.

Buffalo Round Up-Custer State Park, South Dakota-2012

Lynnette VanEpps-Smith-2010