“Bears Ears Monument” by Stephen Lefebure

"Star Trails" (CC BY 2.0) by snowpeak

There is a route that leads to the immense

Spaces where the Spirit wants to stay,

A path this closed existence will allow. 

It includes the place of our emergence

To this world, where our elders say

We first saw the sky above us now. 

The path begins inside us with intense

Presence.  Starting on a path this way

Is like the solemn taking of a vow

To the infinite.  When you commence

Movement, limitations fall away

As your intuition shows you how. 

Here the pictographs are slowly waving.

For a long time we have been erasing

What is sacred everywhere we find it. 

I think every minute we are paving 

Archaeology, and calmly placing

Roads, believing nobody will mind it.

Kivas high on cliffs, the deepest caving —

None are safe, although their distant spacing

Makes them seem outside our world, behind it. 

Places that survive explain that saving

Sites past any hope of our replacing —

We should take that task as though assigned it.  

We were chosen as if by a fate

To be last to see some kinds of beauty.

If Earth could grieve, glaciers would reveal it

By committing suicide, the Great

Reef would blanch, plastic in the sea

Would swirl.  If Earth could not conceal it, 

Rain would fall in sheets and excavate

Hillsides — for pain of such degree

Many different actions would unseal it,

As if Mother meant to uncreate

Herself.  We would then be last to see

Proof that when we harm Her She can feel it. 

About Stephen Lefebure
He/Him/His

Poetry by Stephen Lefebure may be found in his own volume, Rocks Full of Sky, and in Wild Song — Poems of the Natural World and Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon, two anthologies of nature poetry. His work may also be found in journals such as Wilderness, Chicago Studies, Bombay Review, and Bangalore Review. He lives in Evergreen, Colorado, USA.