Potomac Gorge in Tender Flower

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley

 
Wild rocky gorge
Improbable urban neighbor
You own the winter world
 
With your towering cliffs
Singing rapids
And frozen waterfalls
 
Home to
The calling raven, soaring eagle
The diving cormorant and migrant merganser
 
And now it is spring
And your wind-whipped bluffs and scoured floodplains
Cradle the delicate wildflowers
 
Like a great bear holding a fragile bird’s egg
In outstretched claws
Your rock basin coddles the tender
 
Lyre-leaved rock cress
Small white flowers
On trembling stalks above tiny leaf rosettes
 
Under the pines of Bear Island
Nantucket shadbush clings to a crevice
Far from home like so many
 
Unwitting botanical travelers
Ramps, spring tonic of Appalachia
Have found their way downriver
 
The rare white trout lily
Of the Ohio Valley, here
Now, blooming beside her yellow-flowered cousin
 
Here with the bloodroot, the Dutchman’s breeches
The globally rare Coville’s phacelia
The wild blue phlox and golden ragwort, the uncommon twinleaf
 
Tiny ruby crowned kinglets probe
The yellow spicebush flowers above forbidding bluffs
Living ephemera in your land of rock and water
 
You are a raging vertical world flowering
Virginia bluebells your floodplain carpet
As your Great Falls obliterate and bring new life
 

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Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a naturalist and award-winning author of seven nature books, including City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island and The Joy of Forest Bathing. She began writing poetry during the pandemic and had the good fortune to discover Writing in a Woman’s Voice. The site has featured several of her poems, including “How to Silence a Woman,” and “If I have loved you,” both of which won Moon Prizes. Melanie's poetry has also appeared in The New Verse News. She is working on a nature memoir about the Potomac Gorge.