At the Frank Slide Interpretative Centre
The highway through the graveyard
of Frank is a granite moonscape
that glows bone white at night.
But we drove through in August heat
that melted the waxy wings of angels,
the sun bearing down to warm the dead.
Even flies curl up under stones.
Here, the blue turtle’s ancient sleep broke.
A single fin drooped down to shatter dreams.
Humble Frank is silent now, still, lulled
to sleep by the weight of lullabies.
Limestone clouds clutter the streets where
the walking mountain lumbered to a stop.
Today the turtle, she sleeps again.
She dreams the valley back into being.
Sometimes she snores and chases silver trout upstream
but never catches them.
Across the valley a caravan of buses
beetles up a paved road, coughing
tourists in the dusty parking lot.
A Babel of languages tumbles out
welcomes the day.
Cameras stamp postcard smiles,
silver oxide fixed to digital paper
licked and posted, dropped in a box.
From the gift shop window
next to empty t-shirts swelling with hope,
a dreamcatcher
casts a net over the mountain,
but she always slips through the mesh.
One day she’ll hear her name called
awaken, yawn
forget her dreams
and with one stony sneeze –
the valley will cease to exist.
~ Rob K. Omura
Rob K. Omura lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada where he practices law. He holds a BA in psychology and MA in history from the University of Calgary, and a LLB from Dalhousie University. He recently returned to his love of writing after a 15 year hiatus. He is active in education, law reform, the environment and the outdoors. His fiction and poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Arabesques Review, Barnstorm, The Rose and Thorn, Agency, 34th Parallel, Poems Niederngasse, edifice WRECKED and blue skies poetry. He is currently working on a novel.
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