“…walk these rivered hills.”

Shelli Rottschafer of Western Colorado University in Gunnison puts us in a backcountry-state-of-mind in her award-winning poem from the Deep Wild 2025 Student Writing Contest:

Toward New Country: the road is walking too

Step aside 
from your life 
to walk these rivered hills.

Moving water, forever 
in present tense. 

There it is: new country 
rising and unfurling
a language we all ought speak.

Do you hear color,
smell the deconstructed world? 

Can you taste night’s air 
decorated by his fingers? 

Beware, oh wanderer, this feeling 
is a shadow of our own making. 

It fuels our torments
to ware-fully wander our milky ways. 

Knowing, we are made in part, 
out of the dust of stars 

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