By Charles M. Sumid Copyright 2025 Written 1997

The trail unwound, a serpent coiling slow
Through glacial detritus, where old winds blow
From aeons past, when ice of mind grotesque
Did scour this land, and leave a dark burlesque
Of hill and hollow, in a formless dread.

The kames ascended, strangely conical,
Not born of earth, but something primal, mystical,
A mimicry of shape, where nothing good
Should ever be preserved or understood.

The eskers writhed, like monstrous, bony spines
Of things unnamable, whose faint designs
Lurk ‘neath the moss, the creeping, morbid green.

I saw the boulders, erratics vast and mean,
Flung from a chaos far beyond the stars,
And knew their burden, heavier than scars.

They spoke in silence of a deep unrest,
Of churning void, and horrors manifest
Before Man’s feeble, momentary sway.

A kettle-hole—a pool of Stygian black—
Did gape below, from which no sun shone back.
Its perfect roundness, in the wood’s grim heart,
Suggested other things, from space apart.

A vortex sealed, where entropy takes hold,
And secrets slumber, infinitely old.

The trees grew lean, their branches supplicant,
As if to pray to powers indifferent
That brood above the ancient moraine wall.

I heard no birdsong, only the slow, fell
Scratch of my own breath, and a subtle knell
Of something vast that watches from the deep.

The forest air grew thick with dreams of sleep
That know no waking, and no final peace.

O! Wisconsin! Your gentle lands release
But fleeting hope from this cold, earthen fright,
For in this moraine’s primal, frozen light,
I glimpsed the true and unimaginable face
Of all that lies beyond this ordered space.

I shall not walk the Moraine path again.