BENEDICTIO

Edward Abbey

May your trails be crooked, winding,
lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing views.
May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
May your rivers flow without end, meandering
through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past
temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark
primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl,
through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down
into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and
pinnacles and grottoes of endless stone, and down
again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where
bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer
walk across the white sand beaches, where storms
come and go as lightening clangs upon the high crags,
where something strange and more beautiful and more
full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for
you—beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
So long.

by Edward Abbey, from Earth Apples, 1994

With the kind permission of Clarke Abbey, 2019
Photo credit: Goosenecks, Utah © John Miles

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Edward Abbey