Colorado's Children

You children born on this land wild and vast, bare-feet calloused, disheveled hair, rags, dirt, always that reddish dirt, you’re the lucky ones. Your forefather's campfires burn within you- spark- your lineage is life, full and hearty- flame- your stock is proud pioneer- smoke. Oh my children, on certain moonlit nights when, through the valleys and across the rolling hills, you hear the cantabile of the train whistle, the fiddle of its wheels on the track, the opus of its heavy load chugging along, when you smell the starlight in the caller of the Colorado air and you take a deep breath and feel the infinity of space stirring within your lungs, when you feel small and dizzy, when you breathe in and look about, when you breathe out and understand that the breadth of wilderness surrounding you is you, that the frost-shattered peak that made up your first horizon is you, that the rolling, capricious expanse of trees and rocks and wild is, all of it, you and you are it and it’s tangled and inevitable, it’s measureless and consuming, it’s elementarily simple and elegant. Oh my children, that's when you will begin to live! And the trees will no longer just be trees, nor the rocks rocks or the clouds clouds or you you, everything will be pregnant with meaning, with purpose, with will. This land called Colorado produces, dwelling unconsciously within all of us, a deep, deeper than the deepest mine shaft, soulful yearning, a powerful plea, a call to arms and adventure, a tug and pull, an undeniably necessary gravitational attraction towards all that is free, rebellious, untamed, towards all that is impossibly distant, high and buried, towards all that is unique, precarious and not recommended, towards all that is invisible, inopportune, and in-the-way. The yearning, the plea, the call, the tug. Oh my children, you providential sons and daughters of this wilderness, you are the valuable veins of gold that weave through the quartz and granite of normal existence, you have the precious strain of rebellion and reverie channeling through your souls, you dare to be what others can only dig for, you are the rarest of tellurides made up of concealed intellect, ruthless wit, instinctive awareness and feral resolve- this land is your land- oh my young ones, my lucky children, you will grow up with a mysterious sense of awe always hanging about- St. Elmo's fire, a mountain summit sunrise, a summer snowstorm, a crack of dry lightning, a looming gallows frame in the fog- you will befriend all of the animals, you will name the rocks and trees, you will follow the spring snowmelt and bathe in her bubbling pools, you will find the fragrant shade where the elusive herbs hide, you will have vast collections of fossils, bones and bird feathers, you will hear the distant Ute drum beat, feel its stir and heed its call. Oh passionate children, you are the lucky ones, you are the true bearers of verve, you are the archetypes, you are the kids who love life and whom life loves, you children can attain the heights of human zeal and confidence, you children have the esteem, wits and rarity necessary to be as untamed, striking, and enduring as the wildflowers- natures inherent impulse to emphasize beauty beyond strict necessity- that unfold themselves and spread across the endlessly reeling, fantastically fertile hillsides of a life lived fully.

Poem: "Colorado's Children" James Gagnon
Painting: Charles Partridge Adams "Spanish Peaks" Oil

Spirit That Form'd This Scene

Written in Platte Canon, Colorado

Spirit that form’d this scene,
These tumbled rock-piles grim and red,
These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks,
These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,
These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own,
I know thee, savage spirit—we have communed together,
Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
Was’t charged against my chants they had forgotten art?
To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse?
The lyrist’s measur’d beat, the wrought-out temple’s grace—column and polish’d arch forgot?
But thou that revelest here—spirit that form’d this scene,
They have remember’d thee.

Poem: "Spirit That Form'd This Scene" Walt Whitman, from "From Noon to Starry Night" found in "Leaves of Grass" 1900.
Painting: Charles Ragland Bunnell

Bushed

He invented a rainbow but lightning struck it
shattered it into the lake-lap of a mountain
so big his mind slowed when he looked at it

Yet he built a shack on the shore
learned to roast porcupine belly and
wore the quills on his hatband

At first he was out with the dawn
whether it yellowed bright as wood-columbine
or was only a fuzzed moth in a flannel of storm
But he found the mountain was clearly alive
sent messages whizzing down every hot morning
boomed proclamations at noon and spread out
a white guard of goat
before falling asleep on its feet at sundown

When he tried his eyes on the lake ospreys
would fall like valkyries
choosing the cut-throat
He took then to waiting
till the night smoke rose from the boil of the sunset

But the moon carved unknown totems
out of the lakeshore
owls in the beardusky woods derided him
moosehorned cedars circled his swamps and tossed
their antlers up to the stars
then he knew though the mountain slept the winds
were shaping its peak to an arrowhead
poised

And now he could only
bar himself in and wait
for the great flint to come singing into his heart

Poem: "Bushed" Earle Birney, 1974
Photo: JG

Courage Which Will not Quail

"But our courage did not quail. We would not allow ourselves to be depressed by the snow-drift, trailing past the window, any more than if it had been the sigh of a summer wind among rustling boughs. There have been few brighter seasons for us, than that. If ever men might lawfully dream awake, and give utterance to their wildest visions, without dread of laughter or scorn on the part of the audience- yes, and speak of earthly happiness, for themselves and mankind, as an object to be hopefully striven for, and probably attained- we, who made that little semi-circle round the blazing fire, were those very men. We had left the rusty iron frame-work of society behind us. We had broken through many hindrances that are powerful enough to keep most people on the weary tread-mill of the established system, even while they feel its irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did. We had stept down from the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had shut up the ledger; we had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp. It was our purpose- a generous one, certainly, and absurd, no doubt, in full proportion with its generosity- to give up whatever we had heretofore attained, for the sake of showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than the false and cruel principles, on which human society has all along been based."

Prose: Nathaniel Hawthorne, from "The Blithedale Romance" 1852
Photo: JG

Sonnet 4

First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string
With feathery sorcery; muzzle the note
With hurting love; the music that they wrote
Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing
Threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing
For the dear instrument to bear. Devote
The bow to silks and honey. Be remote
A while from malice and from murdering.
But first to arms, to armor. Carry hate
In front of you and harmony behind.
Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.
Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too late
For having first to civilize a space
Wherein to play your violin with grace.


Poem: "Sonnet 4" Gwendolyn Brooks, from "Children of the Poor"
Photo: Jennifer Mapes