Wet clay, and pond scent in the air, and towering

Cat Tails baking at mid-day

Welcome us to the edge of the stream,

Delicious cold stream, with rocks placed just so,

Making stepping stones into the world

Of Clay Mountain.

Gray sands rise in ridges fissured by the rain.

We run and jump over the little valleys.

We marvel over the carcasses

Of dead birds or beavers’ bleached bones

Along the railroad track that runs along

The edge of Clay Mountain.

Remnants of the St. Lawrence Seaway dig,

The big dig, with trucks of gravel gouged

Out of Grandpa and Grandma’s farmland

Carried to make cement

For the Great St. Lawrence Seaway

Connecting the Atlantic Ocean with Chicago.

We never understood back then,

When we used this Clay Mountain for exploring,

For digging up the clay, for imagining a Moonscape

Where we beamed down from Star Ship Enterprise.

We never understood how it got there,

That big Clay Mountain.

We, the Secret Five, who met up in a Maple Tree,

We had our little world of Barbie and of Honey West,

The Beatles and the Man from U.N.C.L.E.

I wonder now, how it looked before

Trucks and heavy equipment came to rearrange the landscape.

Before the Pit and the two Ponds appeared.

by Diane E. Dockum

©June 2013