For Veronica
Led by their hearts, they come in all colors and languages
To peer into the sunlit void,
Maybe say a prayer, toss a coin,
Have a moment of contemplation
Before their faces get plastered to the scene
With the help of silver and a stranger’s eye.
You can see it all here:
The extremes of love and fear.
You can see the love people have for one another
As mothers, fathers, lovers try everything
To prove what never needs to be proven;
The questing spirit that glides here from so far away
To merely see, to turn the page,
Ecstatic at the opportunity;
The eyes that care about it all too much,
That range wide to share it with strangers,
That peer deeply into books and videos,
To make sense of the great mysteries.
But, in equal proportion, on the other side, one sees:
The boilover of the long trip ruining the moment
As uncontrollable feeling lashes through,
Torrents of argument and retribution;
Some lovers at play forget where they are,
The guy sprays water all over the girl,
(Probably to see what's under her blouse),
And she squeals with glee
As the water seeps into the desert unmourned;
People take pictures and throw trash and waste their breath
And lose the moment in daydreams of control
In the face of nature's supremacy.
The thought occurs:
Man is the greatest gift on Earth
As well as its greatest enemy.
To balance both these currents is to fly
(Which took man such a long time to do),
Aligned to the earth, yet moored to the heavens,
Viewing with serenity what's below
And gliding free to what's above.
As for us, ravens kept flying over, until,
At the Canyon, with a city of people surrounding it like a campfire,
The raven looks directly at us and starts to squawk, loud enough
To be heard over all the combined human voices,
Some message that could be about the void,
Or about the bird, from the void, from us, or none of the above…
The not knowing but being aware (as we were) brings the magic
— The magic that will come
When the photographic likeness in our brains
Fades with all its human explanations,
And something more, just started seeding,
A hint of what it knows,
Changes us, as rock can be changed by water,
By carving out some message
Of what we really are.
