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Show The Frontier In a grove of cottonwood standing alive and dead on the floodplain they are sleeping: the holy man in his battered blue trailer, angry-hearted young men, sad women with children in their blankets. Old Colorado river carries high-country soil past red cliffs and crumbling sand banks. First drops of night rain sizzle into dying fires, touch sleeping forms with earth's warm blood dreaming through the veins of their bodies. Darkness cradles them like a hand, old and rough, wrinkled with"mountains, cupping the fragile shape of the continent's first hope. Outliving the agony of invasion, they gather to this one common ground, guarded by watchful, numberless dead, by spirits risen from maimed and silent bodies on the bloodmarked sands of a lost, loved country that we called "the frontier." (on "The Longest Walk" near Grand Junction, Colorado. 1978) |