Sans Souci Way

With April being National Poetry Month, I’ll continue to highlight some poetic pieces, mostly drawing from the expansive creativity of my own family. My cousin, Dick Smith, wrote this beautiful piece I’m featuring here. I was missing Michigan today, so this work is perfect. I’ll begin with Dick’s introduction:

Introduction to Sans Souci Way

Sans Souci is French and means “without care.” It is also a tiny unincorporated community on the shores of the St. Clair River. The setting is on Harsens Island, a part of Clay Township, Michigan. There is a large State wildlife refuge located there where the geese, ducks, and other waterfowl stop in the spring and fall migrations. The birds come in, in great and small “V” formations to a safe resting place, a “home” along the way. For them a home is more than a place, it is part of a life journey, a verb, and so too perhaps it should be for us. We have just assisted the Township in making a grant application to the State to build a 3.0 mile pedestrian/bicycle trail (2 paved, 5 foot wide shoulders along the highway). The Township hopes the project will help promote tourism. Unfortunately the application was not funded.

Sans Souci Way
by Richard O. Smith II

Across the ancient sturgeon depths, on the south of the great blue northern channel, where a heron and a ferry lands, my first footsteps on a Clay pathway lightly tread. There foot by foot my arrogant hopes, like tied up driven dopes lay shoulder by shoulder along the way. Across the marsh, across the fenlands to the olde French trade of Sans Souci, I find a day of passing. Here the commerce on the waters passed from birch bark to cavernous steel, still silently plying the deep blueways, tollways in mind, tolls in time. Great chevrons home the atmospheres and flow to feed upon the flats and rest from nomad quests. Here the path of clay consciousness comes too, to rest from maddening quests in silted wild and creature shallows of Little Muscamoot Bay. A world away, a pause in time, the sub lime slime, a crayfish crawls all cares to a mud castle lair beside my toes a squishing. There prescient schemes do drift to dreams and it is cumulously noble to know nothing at all ~ ~ ~ while breezes blow clear through my ears.

photo credits:
http://www.harsensisland.com/photos.html
http://www.darlor-watch.com