IN THE DIM HILLS OF PENNSYLVANIA
All the cadmium and neon and electricity in the world
Will never wash out
The smudge of nature.
No matter how much we wipe away, there’s more beneath.
I would have thought this place destroyed by now,
The roads rip-cut into the land, the hills and mountains
Of brownfield and tipple, the gravestones
Of business and industry; slabs of pre-stressed, pre-cast concrete
Ballast to weigh down
The shoulders of Atlas.
These Yankees indeed feel the strength
Of their land; they know enough not to shudder at the soul-green hills
Shouldering their way out of a cold morning fog, nor to catch their breaths
On rounding the skirt of a mountain
Their eyes suddenly tumbling
Into the bluest sky and deepest cleft of valley
There ever was. They remember with the minds
Of farmers: the clearing of the land
Was warfare; the fieldstone walls
Are not boundaries. They are memorials
To those felled in battle. Perhaps I haven’t fully learned yet
But I must confess that I, too, am learning
The strength of this land. You see,
I have been a dispassionate atheist all my life
But this day I swear by my heart and soul
And all that I know that is in this world
That if you stand still
And listen close
You can hear God
Chortling
In the dim hills
Of Pennsylvania