Zion (unfinished)

(June 2021. Christian and I took a day to stop at Zion on our way from Colorado to LA. I returned to the Emerald Pools where, with my parents a month before, I had felt such poetic potential. I will need to go back. I am not even close to done with this poem. Maybe 10%. I mean, it’s ZION! The promised land! It inherently refutes the Wasteland by its very existence! If only Eliot had gone West rather than East, he would have realized that there IS water under the red rocks!)

Zion

The promised land is.

The waste land is what one sees
Turned away from the promised land, light
Blocked by our backs, front falling
Into the lie of our own shadow.

The promised land is true, always,
Everywhere—
And not because it is now known as it
But because it could be, possibility we believe
To be coming and becoming with us
Through all that is.

Eden is promised and wasted and always future possible.
The rocks are red, and yet there is real water dripping.
The solution reveals black and white underneath—
The first primal colors of the cave after kill.

Do I delude myself of this emulated emerald?
Do I only seem to see living things, merely imagine
Thin sensitive green seams of the sun
And water moving?

Green is the first color,
For in green the sun found their reception,
The first feelers flung through sunbaked rocks.
Life justifies the sun.

(to be continued…)