Jessi Chipera

Camp May in October

The mountain is speckled with yellow and green.
A river of yellow cascades down the hill.
In this river of yellowing trees I can see
How the mountain is full of this majesty keen,
And next to the river meandering slow
Is a maze of light green and the yellow I know.
The ripe and the unripe: they dance for to kill,
And they show their leaves in a smiling sheen.
The river and maze: they’re apart by the look
Of the dark-but-still-green Ponderosa pine trees.
The striped, majestic, and yellow-green hills
Are not so hidden if you climb high enough.
But there off to the right is a mustard-orange lake.
It’s textured with leaves and the white snowy wake.
But there in the middle of the lake so content
Is a piece of some red peeking out to say hi,
But sure cannot say it, for it’s far too shy.

And then when I walk up the hill speckled sheen
I can see a new color of highlighter green.
The river is now just a random bright show
Of the yellowing leaves falling down like a snow.
The leaves: oh, they quake in the whispering wind,
And then when the wind: it stops calling my name
I can see how the trees do not cover the whole hill.
The grass can now show how it grows in large balls
When there is no grass visible from far below.

The ground: it is lit underneath the tall groves
But the pines make it dark and foreboding and cold.
The same patch of speckled bold yellow and green:
It quakes at me more and now through here I walk.
Seeing dark swollen trees that now mark the wet shore.
And now just beyond dark ghastly shores here and there
Is the lake of the mustard and golden on white.
As I walk through the rusty and alien sight
And as this was just an orange lake long ago
It is now a bright fire over fresh-fallen snow.
As I walk to the core of the blaze in my mind
I can see the red peeking at me once again
So I go out and find it there all by itself
And it tells me how it was once golden and green
But now its original – it is not sheen.
Its red leaves show the snow how to be glory’s king:
A mountain of mystical majesty’s show.