Upon The Windsome Saddle Of This Uncountable Mountain Poem by Robert Rorabeck

What ships the quietness under trees,
When the wind is done complaining,
The roots of men under the earth and cold-
Bitten daisies- There they are like little children
In their dusty cribs.
What an emotionless crop buried with their pocket’s worth of
Gold at the edge of most holidays,
And the clouds are coming in like weary travelers
To see a half involved play.

Where up above, like almost incandescent gods,
Her branches form a rustic bouquet,
Like the quietly irrefutable mother trying to collect
Her children all at once as they disperse like
Spores from lips making a once-only wish;
And I would have liked to save her,
And play with them, but the succession of busy hours
Makes me soporific and my eyes
As drowsy as a hanged man-

For her, I wish I
Was a better poet, considering all that she has given me,
And that my words weren’t just because of all these scars
And loneliness, but she will protect me still, indomitable
Back against the fickle weather,
And I will not complain as I go to sleep in her dusking
Shadows, as she plays me a bucolic lullaby,
And I pretending that I am just a boy settling down
From bright play, and she my mother,
Not just another tree in the forest upon the winsome
Saddle of this uncountable mountain.