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Antelope Canyon
by Paulette Demers Turco
Inspired by Antelope Canyon, near Page, AZ
the largest slot canyon in the U.S.
–photo by Bing Hua
The sand is soft and cool beneath her feet.
The polished fine-lined orange, ochre, coral,
gold, vermillion sandstone towers high
above her shadowed head, as she explores
the fluid curves, the sheen. She sees no cracks
within her view, and glancing up, decides
she’s where the April midday sun, perhaps,
will reach a height above these wavelike sculptures,
whose tops alone now glow. She halts her walk
as beams of light descend, adorn this space.
Calm is not what formed this pristine place,
once a mere fissure in a giant bedrock.
Extremes of weather served as nature’s sculptors.
Torrents of rain have pummeled through the gaps
that widened, multiplied–now water slides
into the Colorado, while attacks
of windblown sand on rock expanded scores
of crevasses, that rounded, deepened–why
the whirl of wind has whispered as a quarrel,
across millennia, yet incomplete.
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