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photo/National Park Service

South Kaibab Trail in Grand Canyon National Park

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At the Grand Canyon

 

A white man and a black man
stand side by side on this precipice,
silently looking across the Grand Canyon,
watching the revolutionary ravens
surf the deep blue ocean of sky
and glide effortlessly on ancient thermals,
scarring the rare thin clear air
with the intelligence of their flight.

A white man and a black man
stand wingless on this precipice
and discuss the utter impossibility
of describing to some friend or stranger
who has never seen the Grand Canyon
this voluptuous vista enveloping them,
the poverty of words to represent
the tattoo on the soul this moment inks.

A white man and a black man
stand alone on this precipice
as friends sharing quiet conversation
and the details of their private lives,
their personal problems vaporized
by the magnificence of this landscape
carved by the snaky undulating Colorado
appearing as a distant trickle far below.

A white man and a black man
stand smiling on this precipice
forgetting for just this one moment
the rude stares of tourists on the bus,
the invisible walls that exist everywhere,
the daily ritualized micro-insults
wearing thousands of polite disguises
to conceal the ignorance and racism.

A white man and a black man
stand together on this precipice
pondering the immensity of the gulf
that stretches before and between them,
the huge ugly social trench dug by human hands,
brought back to the hard, sad fact
that all they share is words, words, words,
and the wings of birds cannot bridge this gap.

A white man and a black man
turn their backs to this precipice as friends
and walk away from the yawning abyss
faint hope firing across the synapse of friendship
walk back side by side up the trail together
walk back to the inherited daily brutalities
walk back to this world’s cancerous conventions
walk back to murderous malice and polite hypocrisy.

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T..S. Davis is the author of Sun + Moon Rendezvous, a book of poems, and the former producer of the Seattle Poetry Slam. He’s published poems, essays, and nonfiction in a variety of magazines including Rattle, The Lyric, Bellingham Review, 14 X 14, Blue Collar Review, Amethyst Review, Henhouse, and Your Genealogy Today, among others. Mr. Davis is a retired Registered Nurse who lives in rural Arizona and writes creative nonfiction and Shakespearean.sonnets. 

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Listen to “Blue in Green” from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue…The piece was written by Bill Evans

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