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Cleft Mountain’s Mysteries  View of the tent rocks from inside a cleft in the mountain. |
Giant cone-shaped tent rocks,
Soaring to the sky, stand proud
Like sentry boxes of a long-gone Turkish or Persian army
Guarding entry to some bastion mythical
That’s tucked away within the arid canyon.
Ever narrower the passage,
Nearly choking access toward the inner sanctum.
Here the massive transverse logs, face-high, remain
Where killer floods had sagely wedged them as deterrent obstacles.
Now the dry of desert
dominates again,
With cholla, yucca and the prickly-pear
Providing barbs as added hindrance on the way,
Assuring that the faint of heart will turn away.
Not I. I must prevail
to spy that legendary fortress deep inside,
Where with clanging armor knights ride steeds all white
And sally forth to meet marauders and repel attacks.
Where royal story-tellers and the falconers appear
Within a formal garden full of green and rose and haze
beyond the maze.
Where siren beauties call to visitors
And lure them to their doom.
Where lives a princess irresistible
Who, despite her magic touch,
Has yet to meet her dreamland groom.
I struggle through the
stony funnel
Till I fit no more between the walls that crush the hips,
Till finally I sense the men that brandish whips
With hundred eyes that scrutinize me,
Till unsettling moans emerge and echo hauntingly,
Till I can see the ravens ominously soar on high
To warn that death lurks very near.
---Kasha-Katuwe
Tent Rocks
National Monument, Cochití Pueblo, NM
©2008 by Paul Hertelendy. This poem first posted May 12, 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
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