To Celebrate the First Birthday of the new Public Library in Mancos, Colorado, June 30, 2010
Consider the river:
Fresh water falling
from snowpack to desert
talus to sandstone
Always slave to gravity
still, tumbling free
splashing bursts of laughter
in your face
We all need this free-flowing water.
Consider this place:
Ideas tumbling off pages and screens
strong or murmuring or deceptively still
creating a current that carries us straight
out of these doors and into the world
We are the rocks in this one-year-old river
Words washing over us
they swirl and eddy and change
the way we look at things.
We all need this free-flowing water.
Open these doors and release the dam
Enter this place and you enter the flood
of ideas of knowledge of
words powerful
words small
words of sand and sky, of sorrow and joy,
of grand and false hopes
Words to inspire, instruct,
Instigate
This is a place to read
and write and search out the words
that will pick you up and
roll you right down that riverbed.
The story begins
with paper in hand
or sound in ear
or an entire world held on a screen
You too can move
from treeline to canyon
following the flow of your own
Intuition
Enter this place and you’re in the river
We all need this undercurrent
When we read
We are free.
Poem by Danielle Desruisseaux
