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Do You Hear Them?
Spoken word with improvised instrumentation.
Sometimes I am lucky enough to hear the echo of ancient thunder in sacred places. This image carried me away from the banks of Montana’s Flathead River.
AM – reading, vocals, acoustic and electric guitar
N. Scott Robinson – Native American flute, Cameroon idi and ideh seed rattles, noah bells, scraped gourd, bodhran
Ralph Gordon – cello
Poem by A. McKnight, ©2003 Catalooch Music, BMI
Do you hear them?
faint like distant thunder
approaching across autumn-grass prairie
dry and waving yellow yielding
as the black mass undulates from eye to horizon
Do you hear them?
Do you hear them?
Sweeping the gently rolling plain
around the down gullies
and dry washes
fleeing the wild calls and fearsome speed
of strange beings;
not man
nor bird
nor beast
but all these creatures combined
the dull thunder of massive motion
ten hundred thousand tons
like lightning fire sweeping the tinder-dry prairie
Do you hear them now?
They are slowing
They are fading
They are close now
Close to the brink
The wildness is slipping and disappearing
Down the dry washes
Tumbling and lost into the river below
Their majesty still ringing on the canyon walls
Do you hear them?
Those who have tamed all in this moment
turn now to their tranquility and travail
forgetting the wild past lost
only to remember it in inconvenience
in its rare eruptions into the irrigated present
the hoofbeats are singular now
sporadic
spread far to the margins
of the wild heart below
But it is still in the land
when the moaning wind dims to a whisper
the sounding memory still beats beneath
brave and willful
do you hear them
now?
