Sourland Mountain Preserve, “Mr. Smiley Face” major rock at entry
Lately, the Muse has become relentless, interrupting key reading to dictate her latest devisings. Tonight, she’s kept me at reformatting and meticulously improving page after page in her new poetry notebook. Maybe she’ll ‘get off my back’ for awhile, if I turn one of her latest into a blog for you. Might even go so far as to illustrate it a bit.
I always considered this Hauptmann’s Ladder — this site so near the hasty grave of the Lindbergh baby...
I’ve been out on this trail (in Hopewell, off Greenwood Avenue, which is off Route 518 mid-town at the light at the vintage pharmacy.) Its magic only increases with each visit.
Rocks Exhale Lenape Presence
An assignment for US 1 (Business!) Newspaper, at their request, features the Sourlands Mountain Preserve as one of four shady hike sites. As I say in the story, along those trails, there is no Philadelphia or Manhattan; no Princeton; not even Hopewell. Matters political are so remote as to be impossible, although their results can extensively and even destructively affect sacred sites such as these.
Without determined preservationists, we would not have had these hikes. Nor would you, and others, (including my daughter’s literature class) have this poem. Enjoy, and walk this shaded trail, as summer burgeons.
My sister, Marilyn Weitzel, Janet Black and Betty Lies Bird the Sourland Mountain Preserve Trail (see what I mean about SHADE!)
SOURLANDING
a short walk in the dense woods
where temperature and season
remain irrelevant
silence itself audible
now and then broken
by ovenbirds’ shrill cries
in the right light
blessed by
orotund tones of wood thrush
domain of terrestrial turtles
and the occasional owl
dark ponds all a-shimmer
with polliwogs
towering rocks
still breathe Indian presence
at trail-top, we might ride
the grown-ups’ teeter-totter
hand-hewn from a wind-felled tree
“If you would attempt exercise
go in search of
the springs of life,” asserts
Henry David Thoreau
“The world today
is sick to its thin blood
for lack of elemental things,”
Henry Beston mourns
CAROLYN FOOTE EDELMANN
Summer Solstice 2016
njwildbeauty 