On the Way to Two Medicine

Call to awaken a storyteller, calls to awaken me

On the way to Two Medicine,

Driving

Coffee in hand, basking in the glory of daylight – but then,

The weather gets overcast and moody.

Aspens are ceremonial sentinels holding secrets of ages past

Summer landscape becomes cold and snowy

The river in the heart of the aspen trees

Feels forlorn, but healing.

Lying a broken wafer on the cradle of life,

The trembling mouth of reality sinks in— “most of Waterton’s been shut down for the season”

Sunken under ashes, but I look to the signs

Green goddess only now reclines in dreams

Things will be different for the next decade, the papers say

Glad I was able to hike the trails in the park’s glory days before fire took its breath away

The native seed sewn

Raven shaman

Shakes his rattle over the earth

Tell me this:

Ousel Peak

Moccasin Creek

Paola Creek

Essex Creek

Bear Creek

Devil Creek

Zips Cabin

Do you know the way to

S k y l a n d?

Perhaps take a drive-up old Camas Road before departing,

On the way to Two Medicine

Truth be told

Lodgepole, declare the validity of your story

Pitch in your cones

Melted by the ignition

Of flames

Releasing life-giving seeds to the earth

To sustain

Even with the last vestiges of your being       

being snuffed out

The fire that rages, once thought an enemy to your existence

Is now known to be

An important cycle of the forest.

Nature has planned for fire

Fear not, my aching heart, longing for what once was

The expanse of greenery, wilderness, once drank luxuriously

Is now a cinder creating foreign bleakness

Because sunlight again pours over the huckleberry bush

Nature designed the fire.

Fear not,

The canopy will return one day

Go to the woodland chapel despite all this, go to the chapel anyway,

Growing, surviving

Finding greener prairie dog paths

Pastures edged with saplings

The cycle of the forest knows

The man of the woods is his guise

He will take to the trailways of Wishbone

On his very next holiday.

- thisisaaron – poem from the past written 7.22.18 revised 5/2/25