The People
Centrist and moderate
The silent majority
The melting pot
The inexorable movement of a people
Because for all attempts to stop us
At all borders and with barriers,
We move
We are the most
Inexorably living, anyway
Maybe rudely, maybe with elegance
Bearing style
Or dirt from head to toe from growing things
(or both)
We cannot be stopped
Nature is with us
Insanity might say,
We’ll stop you with a bullet
Though before it runs out of ammo
Another force will kill the guns
Horror, shame, or for despots
Lack of profit
There is a story of a mountain people
I mean people who are mountains
Who look down on the plains
To see ants fighting without earning food
Or materials for homes,
For they cannot make the trails
Only one set: for warfare or for building
The mountain people are bewildered
And are always powerful
And now must contemplate
Relearning the ants or, failing that,
Clearing off the plains (for people who are
mountains it would be easy)
Allowing other species with the skills and
With forbearance
To have the fertile earth
Someone is watching now
To measure up the borders
All of them
C L Couch
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
One of the most beautiful destination in California are the Sierra Nevada Range both in the summer and winter.
clcouch123 
March 5, 2020 at 8:57 pm
Is that how you see American society, a centrist, moderate, melting pot, moving forward in an inexorable rightness? From the outside you are very difficult to work out. Or are you the mountain people simply too huge and massively in the right to take any lip from the ants?
March 5, 2020 at 9:28 pm
I guess I am writing about my own society, since that’s the one I know, And I think if we took the borders down, we’d find real people on either side who simply want to live and wouldn’t mind getting along. I’m not sure who the mountain people (people made of mountains) are. A force larger than ourselves, because there always is one, at least one. And those who think they’re on top, not of mountains but of society–and they are only a few in part because they want it that way–can be knocked down. I don’t mean to be preaching revolution so much as inexorable force. Force of nature, maybe. Marlowe in his play about Tamburlaine saw this as a wheel that inevitably brings all despots down.
March 5, 2020 at 10:00 pm
There is a force, a brotherhood that has no need of protest movements and cheering crowds to exist, it’s the brotherhood of the rich and powerful. It transcends boundaries. They are the people made of mountains, I think. Nothing touches them. It’s a good image.
I think I understand about the mass of people simply wanting to get along. The US must have been like that at one time, when everything seemed possible. Our European societies are much more fractured, quicker to protest, more rebellious I suppose, as you are if you think you’re poor.
Funny you should mention Tamburlaine, it’s the name of this farm. I’d love to know who gave the place this name and why. It’s on the earliest Cassini map (1761), when place names were single farmhouses. There’s another house built at Tamberlan (the French equivalent of Tamburlaine) now, as the property was divided a while back. One day I will write a story about how this bit of farmland was given such an outlandish name.
March 6, 2020 at 1:46 am
I would like to learn the story of the naming of your farm!
There has been this understanding or ideal that people here, at heart, want to learn about each other and live as neighbors. Certainly, the rich and conquering have done their best to ruin that intent and hope. Hidden agendas do their best to wreck everything.
I hope the rain is ceasing there or will be, soon.