Congratulations to Matthew Lee for winning third place in The Scripps College Journal Writing Contest with this poem!
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Observe that water in a wide landscape:
how enriching and enriched life is,
how a place’s vitality is measured,
can be measured, by the birdsong breathing
through the trees which trailed that pioneering
river, itself a demarcation made
as violent as with a cattle-driven blade.
The sound of that water in a wide landscape
is not unlike the sound of crystal, or of
cannon fire, those peopled ornaments
which follow that river into an arid place.
But these are subsidiary considerations;
those sounds are born of that of water moving
through a still or empty space, proving
only the old conspiracy of resemblance:
anything seen is seen again in mirrors
of the airs and motions of a prior time,
its presence marked by copses, shade, or noise,
lesser copies of the original pulse.
X, this is the life you’ve sown into the ground.
X, you are that river, that portentous sound.