Tundra Sculpture
This is my first Alaskan poem. I call it Tundra Sculpture.
If you long to see the tundra, you must somehow climb the sky
and sail above Earth’s time-scarred face and wonder as you fly.
God sent his gentle fury down a million years and still
to carve a magic sculpture of each river, slough, and hill.
The sloughs he gouged with fingers like some child in love with clay,
and childlike ran off to find some other tricks to play.
He filled some sloughs with water, leaving others autumn dry;
in some spots spruce, in others only tundra grass, and sky.
He splashed the stand of willow trees along the riverbed
and then, capricious, moved the flow to someplace else, instead.
He changed his mind. He changed his mind. He changed it once again
to show us that he’s human too, every now and then.