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Earth’s First Priority
Love’s fine
But what the world
Most desperately needs
Is fewer or, perhaps, smaller
People.
To The Aurora Borealis
A silence you are,
A serene cold stillness,
A glowing, flowing quietude.
Aloft, aloof, you’re
A grand discrepant noiselessness,
A resounding silence in the sky.
Commencement
With a hundred or so generations
Of experience under his parka,
There was so much Caleb could foresee.
First time on the river, anyone could tell
The future of the spruce along the cut bank,
Leaning at various angles, some already sweepers.
A cheechako, sitting on a hillside,
Watching a feeble cow falling behind
A caribou herd, defeat already
In her eyes, then four wolves loping down
The same trail, their long tails streaming
Horizontal, can easily envision
The canines licking blood-stained muzzles.
With a hundred or so generations
Of experiences under his parka,
There was so much Caleb could foresee.
How many cycles, patterns, progressions
Were cached in his mental inventory?
In all those generations, there was little
To alter the rhythms of the river,
Woods or tundra.
Now, a boisterous crew
With a few pieces of heavy equipment
Can, in half a day, drastically alter
A future they never envisioned.
With a hundred or so generations
Of experience under his parka,
There was so much Caleb could foresee.
Ken Rehill: After more than twenty years in the counseling
field in Kingman Arizona, he jumped at an opportunity to come to Fort
Yukon a year and a half ago. He is employed by the Council of the Athabascan
Tribal Governments as program administrator for the Yukon Flats Care Center and
is responsible for providing behavioral health services to residents of ten remote
villages in Alaska's northern interior, reachable only by airplane. He hadn't
previously written for publication but he can't NOT write about what he is experiencing there!
He began submitting in April, 2004 and, so far, 30 poems have been accepted for publication
by Mobius, Poetic Voices, Poetry Motel, Soul Fountain and other presses.
Email: Ken Rehill
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