Homage to Creeks

This is a last monochrome view of the creek we will be leaving tomorrow

and probably won't be back before late spring.

A creek is a manageable human-sized waterway,

Many of us loved a nearby one in out childhoods.

Homage: Summer/Winter, Shay Creek

           In the Shining

I've got my chair and a good book and I'm sitting
out behind the cabin in a shaft of sunlight reading.
A couple of Stellar's jays who might be my friends
perch themselves on branches in the ponderosa
and sugar pine. They can't read the book I've got
but they can read me and they watch very carefully
for that moment when my hand reaches in
to my pocket and pulls out some crusts of bread
which I toss out over the forest floor and the jays
spring off the limbs and streak down in a blue blaze,
scoop the crusts and are back on the limbs again
chortling. This is the way of my life these days---
lazing, serene, but not so indolent, not so torpid
that I won't get up now and then, grab my chair,
and move to another spot, over there by the cedar,
to that new place shining now in the sun.

Joseph Stroud

The Geography of Home; California Poetry of Place, Heyday Books, 1999, page 370.

I love the way Stroud treats his own creek in this poem.