This upcoming week I will be in Big Bend National Park in Texas. This place is pretty incredible — it is like you’ve landed on an alien planet with barren lands marked by wild rock formations. Red, dusty, beautiful. I’ve been here before and that trip inspired by poetry book, Terraforming: A Story of the Heart and Separation (which you can find at the bottom of groundedinone.com.) In honor of returning to this park, I’ve decided to post the poem that comes from my poetry narrative/book that is titled “Big Bend.” This piece fits into the narrative well, I think, as a way of describing the new planet the character in the book finds themself in. I hope you enjoy! Feel free to check out the full book in you are so inclined.
“Big Bend” I can hear it in the silence. The complete silence and its voice is timeless as it clearly speaks like how the wind brushes my feet-- its plans for me. Crazy how that happens right? When we finally stop being uptight and absorb the light from the sun and stars and really let it affect your heart. It speaks when we’re listening and when we think honestly and don’t go on into the dissonance, distancing us as our minds start soliciting the lies that ourselves are whispering. And the rock protrusions scream the glory of it and they’re like the planets’ hands outstretched in praise and I, in turn, am left in confusion and in a state of delusion but I come to the conclusion that these mountains leave it proven. The force that pushed these mountains together are great but a more creative and powerful thing is here and it creates the universe and dictates its laws and narrates our lives. It’s here and its creative creation is sweeter than any Shakespeare poem. Desert with the mountains outlined in black with the dark of night looking at light years away. My mother can’t comprehend the whole light year thing but my brother and I kinda think that’s the point. That there is no endpoint. That those stars and galaxies beyond ours that are cold and old and hot were brought into existence by the thing that sought us. Its art work in the sky brings a sense to my heart that words can’t say or impart. Orion fighting Taurus in a story untold makes no difference to me but still takes hold of me and leaves me to behold this thing. M35 shining in my eye with multitudes of stars light years away in no way deprived as they thrive. The sunrise bright orange peering over the mountains across the roaming blue sky on the desert plains left me tongue tied and crying and in no way denying this masterpiece of creativity My soul is split like a river and the mountains that lean over both sides of the banks which were once one. I can’t help but think we’re the same, interlinked by the same ancestry. Disobeying the same law and held under another — our river is drying up and we are trying not to think about the end and dying, but we’re lying. The wind blew in tonight leaving a dust cloud while the last bit of ray piercing through the hazy sky dimmed the desert ground and I begin to look around and realize I’m no longer crowned. And you can make out the rock formations into elephants or lions or burros like the constellations and the stories that go with them but there is only one story that tells the truth…
Be free in the present,
Trace Maddox