Earthquakes And Other Upsets Poem by Christopher Woodall

The hills will wander in their time
Over the bones of men
Who once when suited thought it fine
To booted walk on them;
Their language is the tree and scree
Their thoughts the crack of rock
Not for them the foolish debris
Of man’s chattering flock
Whose dwellings lie like droppings on
The carven face of earth
And whose words and dreams thereupon
Seem of trivial worth.

Though men have looted their bellies
And clambered on their head;
Though many Machiavellis
From mountain-flesh have fed
Poison-producing reactors
And women’s greedy eyes;
Despite real-estate contractors
And ministers’ green lies,
All that the land must do is yawn
Too often or too long
And to the dust from which he’s drawn
Man falls, however strong.

In the literature of forests
And libraries of slate
The collected works of Horace
With Dante’s conjugate;
All the saplings and the pebbles
Set their minds on epic
Longer than the Trojan rebels
Or the annals Vedic,
So ignore the rambling tall men
With backpacks and gaiters
Who stumble through the realms of Zen
Elegant as freighters.

The wind of their breath comes faster
On the shoulders of hills
Through the speedwell and the aster
Their philosophy fills
The mountainside whose stones deride
Their naïve sense of self;
But why compare these men who stride
With continental shelf?
On such a day the air expired
Between two worthy friends
If relatively uninspired
Means everything to them.