Special Thanks to William Cleary for this contribution.

VERMONT SONG

My old dad sang that Ireland just fell "from out the sky one day":
but my song tells how Vermont was scooped together
by the hands of a mother glacier whose giant fingers
loved the mud-time feel of water-soaked soil

with its mushy green-edged wetlands surrounded by talkative frogs
who spent the day croaking out bad weather predictions
and the nights chanting how they'd failed at love.

The glacier was huge, a thousand miles long,
but while sleeping at night its eastern fingers would crack off
the solid warm granite of Vermont's edges, and in the morning
it would shape them like sugar cookies into a hump-back camel or a dancing bear,
a squirrel house, a hoe-cake or a breadloaf.

After the giant had its daily lunch of pond ale and maple sprouts
it would lay back and dream into being stand-up animals who lived
where there would be lots of apples to eat and everybody got to vote,
and where map-patched cows munched the deep green grass,

a mountainous land of icy winters and farm-quilt woodlands
of trees bubbling with rising sweet sap in the spring,
and in the fall fiery color patches draping over the mountains
as if the hills were the clothes-lines of clowns and acrobats.

That's the way I sing about Vermont especially when the harvest moon rises
and there echoes back a forlorn groan out of the north
from an ancient glacier spirit telling of her sad pilgrimage here long ago
that left six sweet lake children behind,
the smallest and most enchanted in Vermont.

by William Cleary ©

Read a little diddy about yearning for your loved one to return... The Clock - by Ali Hall