"Amongst All Things I Cherish You Most," a Poem from "Midnight 30, American Poems"

Edvard Munch Starry Night (1922.) Courtesy Munch Museum "Munch : Van Gogh" at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Amongst All Things I Cherish You Most

Amongst all things I cherish you most:

silent, deserted tracks,

paths winding steeply up

to the hazy tops, murmurs of footsteps

muffled by silent slopes,

ascensions to sylvan hermitages.

When the first snow

shuts all man within their weary

dwellings, then even the timid fox

sticks its head out of the woods,

sniffing with its pointed nose the air

in the scant November dusk.  

Similarly a vagrant finds some peace

and no longer despairs in his wandering,

when the blackening earth closes the corolla

of the horizon, and like ancient weeping,

the oblivious, sooty sky

is a mute blanket, unutterable.      

(The Appalachians, November 2013)

From "Midnight 30, American Poems," by A. Baruffi,  published by LiteraryJoint Press, is available as e-book on Amazon Kindle, iBookstore, NOOK Book, Kobo, and Lulu.

Midnight thirty: half-hour past "Geisterstunde," as it is still called in the broody hillsides hamlets of inner, rural Pennsylvania. In the deep stillness of the night, the tongue is loose, the eye quick, the ear alert, and the mind finally conducive to grasp all that in daylight is hidden. It is only at that time that truth is said, or whispered...
"In this surprising work of modern American literature, like a shimmering, wild creek under the full moonlight, the vein of poetry taps into the inexhaustible resources and riches of the land, and runs with inspiration and wisdom..."