Red Rocks

"Three hundred million years
of the Earth's making
are written here on red rock,
faces smooth or swirled,
streaked, striped, or banded,
creased and creviced, scoured and pocked,
sculpted into figure, frieze, and phallus,
tower and spire, chimney, mesa, bluff and butte,
rust red against Utah's cobalt sky.

Red rock scarred, or stained black
and silvery slate with "desert varnish"
by microbes grasping minerals from the air.

Rocks reddened by traces of iron,
fissured and finned, eroded into shapes
named mushroom, goblin, hoodoo,
evoke a sacred space. This stark,
vast, dry, and fragile place
is slow to change, impossible to repair.

Red rock stretches away to the horizon
or falls sharply to the secret canyon floor,
presses in, blots out patches of azure sky,
slices off light, forces our thoughts inside.

We humans have never been so small as we are here.

Judith Wolinsky Steinbergh, National Geographic Magazine, March 2005
"84532: Writing on the Land"