Think ahead whereat you go!
Pack your pack, your saddle bags,
your camera, craft, your fishing pole,
your sleeping bag, your pocket knife,
flashlight, poncho, wooly cap
Whichever map will get you back!
To canyon, forest, peak, and stream,
quiet eye of deep down things,
juice and joy of streaming light
within, along, above, below
What’s very good that needs you not!
Paws and claws, gills and wings,
trunk and branch, flower stems,
mother dew and father cool,
beauty’s changing discipline
In the rhythm you’re returning to!
Ever fresh and ever new,
re-creation’s symmetries,
pour off tarns and pocket cirques,
travois tracks and medicine wheels
The smallest thing the hardest to do!
Leave ‘em alone, just let it be
a column of moonlight,
marmot snouts,
wetland seeps.
Greg Hobbs 9/5/2014
(In celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act)
Here’s part of the note that Justice Hobbs sent along with the poem:
John, a poem I wrote for the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act at the CU Law School this past Thursday and Friday…[The] photo [is] from a family backpacking trip into the Weminuche Wilderness in 1986. Brother Will Hobbs, then a teacher at Miller Junior High School in Durango and now a renowned young adult author http://www.willhobbsauthor.com, centered his first couple of books Bearstone and Beardance on this area of the Weminuche Wilderness where the Divide bends back to Wolf Creek Pass above Silverton, Durango, and Pagosa Springs.