Alaskan Farewell

The mountains stand there still. Towering giants in rocky armor Royal sentinels of the Alaskan Guard. Thick green their tunics of birch and pine Sheer white their helmets of sun-beaming snow And icy sabers in crystal scabbards Hang from earthen belts of blackened sod. There in the dusk of violet shadow The piercing eye can see The deepening crevices of countless centuries Etched in those imperious faces Of glacier-hewn stone. But my time is gone Turned to dust in the arctic wind And no more My eyes behold imperial splendor No more my heart sing in the stinging cold Free from the smoke of city steel. Yes I did sing Once. My winged spirit sailed o'er those rocky crags And flew unbounded toward the low-lying sun. Full in the face of the golden moon My heart cried exultantly in the blue-diamond night To hear the silence of a time-stopped river Frozen in starlight on the ground below. Yet a memory lives When reality dies And there in the darkness of a Brooklyn street I will remember And sing again For the mountains stand there still. ~ Laurence Overmire (Previously published in Shadyvale Magazine, Fall 1999)