Poem: Saluda

I felt words in my mouth.
They tasted like grit,
Like the dust in the air
Of red-clay roads
I walked as a boy.
I tasted the breeze
Wetted with spray,
Fragrant with weeds
And wildflowers
Growing from cracksI
n the rocks of the dam
That Sherman blew up--
On the cold Saluda River
Outside the city
In the South
Where I was born.
I smelled the moon's white light
Bathing the rapids' rocks,
Silvering the spray and foam
Thrown by the swift night current
Racing below my feet.
This is the place where
Friends met-- to stay cool
During hot sun days.
This is the place
They brought their lovers
To lay them on soft rocks,
To let the Moon's scented light
Swoon them,
Shadow them,
Lull them asleep.
These were the old days and nights.

Now an older man sits on the rocks.
They are hard.
The water is swift and dangerous--
It always was.
The stories of people
Trapped and drowned
Were like fairy tales
To the younger man then.
It never happened to a friend--I
t was always someone in the papers.
They didn't hear the siren's song,
When power company people
Opened the locks upriver.
None of the dead were his friends.
This older man can speak,
Not feel, his words.
He feels, not tastes, the breeze.
He sees the Moon's bright light
And sadly knows it has no smell;
Yet the rapids' cold spray, its roar,
Its fierce current
,Flowing out of sight down river,
Seem to speak a language
He can hear--
He, sitting in the moonlight,
With thinning gray hair.

Copyright 2006 by M. David Orr