KAWEAH 022815 a - CUSHIONS

James Michael Taylor

KAWEAH (says the crow)

“Kaweah, Kaweah”

There’s a place on up the hill
Redwood trees are standing still
The murmur of the river will invite you

Lay your head down on a rock
You’ll forget about the clock
The whisper of the sun will melt the shadows

“Kaweah,” as the crow would say
“Kaweah,” as he flies away
“Kaweah, Kaweah.”

When I was a senior in high school I lived in a little town in California called Woodlake.
At Woodlake the San Joaquin Valley met the foothills of the Sequoias.
That summer my brother John and I would hop on a pickup three times a day
and head to the fields east of town to move the aluminum pipes
that fed the sprinklers that watered the alfalfa
The water was pumped from a lake fed by the Kaweah River. Lake Bravo.

Each shift we would have to remove the clogged sprinkler heads
and pick out the mangled bodies of the frogs that had made it passed the screens.

We didn’t know that Lake Bravo was where the Kaweah River ended.
We didn’t know that our pipes were sucking the river dry.
That the melting snow from the Sequoias never made it to the Pacific Ocean.

Kaweah, Kaweah

“Kaweah,” as the crow would say
“Kaweah,” as he flies away
“Kaweah, Kaweah.”

© 2015 Royal T Music