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By PAUL HERTELENDY
of TheColumnists.com
Near-perfect guests,
our foreign visitors:
Gregarious, effusive, animated,
Witty, affable. Their only flaw:
A pair of English words eluding them
Like swifts avoiding nets.
Their
lead-dense schedule
Dropped them in Las Vegas,
Where a one-day window
Opened for a fast Grand Canyon trip
To savor that chasm-odic nucleus of poetry and dreams,
That shimm’ring rainbow of vermilion strata
When the sun slides low.
But late
deparrtures in the van,
Along with quick stops, snack stops,
Gas stops and the all-important pit stops
Left the party, hours late,
To land on canyon’s rim
An hour after sunset,
When mega-flash would not suffice
To light their snapshots,
Leaving them to contemplate majestic silences
Along the buttresses of nature’s glorious cathedral.
Soon
the lengthy journey of return
Would cut them slack to rue
Two words that none of them had learned
Or could recall.
©2008 by Paul Hertelendy. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This poem first posted March 3, 2008.
Paul Hertelendy is critic
and webmaster for the arts-review web site www.artssf.com, and
is also the Piedmont (CA) Centennial poet laureate. To visit his
website, click here: PAUL
You can comment
on this column online. Please address your message to either
"The Editors" or Paul Hertelendy. To send an email,
click here and don't forget to mention Paul's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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