Old Pilgrim In The New Rain

Where you going John? To the hill. There’s nothing there anymore. Maybe.

Old Pilgrim In The New Rain

Old John Pilgrim had to know. He had to know why. From the fresh morning wooden porch he saw that the statue on the far hill had nearly disappeared. It hadn’t moved from its mount, rather grown less vital to the eye. Somehow, the belief it stood for had fled from the ranches into the empty lands west.

Beneath the early sun sit lesser creatures
who clutch last night’s mud, leave
their lesser prints.

Old John had to know. The prairie for many a wasteland was to him who began in the morning with boots and bootsteps a beautiful garden and the statue of inspiration on the hill a beacon.

Cows on the scrub birth
their wet calves on the greenlands that fade
in winter, brighten in spring.

On the dirt road Old John made his way with his old steps that even though no longer lively still paced the morning steady. A neighbor passed slow in a pickup truck.

Where you going John?

To the hill.

There’s nothing there anymore.

Maybe.

Out past the barb wire John lit a cigarette and let the breeze take its smoke from his lung to a sky which had released a few drops of rain. Weather was fitful or even broken this time of year as it migrated west and south into the windswept places.

The land commanded. In some spots rocks rose in vermiculate barren majesty to shelter snakes and scorpions without which there would be no beauty for they granted in their toxic nature the extremes with which to compare.

History also swelled. It blew itself large in the morning as John walked for the hill over a large earth that radiated its patrimonial renderings of people who had claimed it for their own after the people who had lived upon it without demand that it surrender had been beaten back to their ancestors.

The coffee on the fire
in the house
cools as the logs ash.

John coughed once and the statue on the hill regained for a moment its former splendor before it thinned again. Behind him the prints in the prairie began their renewal as small dewed blades of grass in resilience straightened.

To be born here in this place and live an uphill life and then to see the world flatten in its surety that there is no more than the brief renewal of fields that become plain dirt again to look forward to pushed John toward the hill that still in the distance suffered small.

Yet it grew closer and John climbed. A rest on the slope, he sat and watched a wild blacked horse below while he smoked another cigarette and took the time to view the landscape and ask it to answer why a statue that yesterday tall stood today small.

Because your heart has dimmed.

As answers that arrive on a solo breeze go it was adequate and possibly truthful even though no one had unearthed a cure for diminished faith or enflamed disillusion. Old John had encountered both from time to time even though he also found grace in the wide horizon when the sun sank red in the evening and darkness concealed for a while all ills.

He stood and pushed his legs upward another forty minutes of incline. The statue loomed with its chiseled face sorrowed for those who would not come near.

John put his boot on the next step of rock and kept his face with its sweat from the closer clouded sun painted brown as his father’s was before him. The morning was yet fine and his questions nearly answered. A hawk brief shadowed his path as it passed and flew as attendant to the top of the hill where it took earth and waited.

When there too John let his limbs drain their distress and watched the land below turn green and gray as the rains gathered. It would be a wet return to his fire but worth it. He touched the base of the statue and felt its steadiness stay him.

— — —

Thank you for reading Dynamic Creed. It seems I’m doing everything off kilter lately between erratic publication and on a Saturday no less. To add to my out of habit behavior, I’ll mention that the statue in this story is on a hill to the west of where I live. It’s around 100 feet tall I guess, but from here looks to be about an inch and half. I walked to it one night on a pilgrimage through the scrub and fences with a flashlight, arrived in early morning. Earlier this year, for some reason it looked smaller than I remembered and this story happened.

That’s enough explanation text which I rarely do. I will say Feliz Navidad. If you don’t do that sort of thing, that’s okay; translate it into something that applies for you.

I’m out of here for 2024, going to kick back and let the dogs howl. Many thanks for being here, and I hope that all is well at your end. Stay blessed.

Victor David