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Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon
Poetry. GOING DOWN GRAND, the first full length anthology of Grand Canyon poems, gathers the voices and thoughts of explorers, cowboys, river- runners, hikers, artists, geologists, rangers, and others whose words reveal and bear witness to this complex and magnificent place. For readers on the river, the trails, the rim, or beyond, the poems on these pages will make fine canyon company.
- GenresPoetry
148 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 8, 2025
This was a nice companion read for A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
August 15, 2019
Mortals: meet
The empty air,
Arias carved
Out of rocks beyond
Our puny clock
Philosophy.
Thea Gavin
Juniper trees lacing this desert landscape, the color of a pine green that rests in my dreams, thoughts yielding to elements of sun, light, heat, storms, western sky, lichen described as being as prolific and extravagant as coral, a place that creates "a peace that exists only in this place where I most belong, an interval I wholly owned." These poems capture so much of the experience, taking the indescribable beauty, the un-capturable grandeur, the stunning astonishment and gives a taste of what it feels like, sounds like, or how you breathe when above, in, on, near the Grand Canyon. I just finished a fantastic biography of John Wesley Powell who made the first runs down the canyon, and then I hiked the headwaters of the Colorado River in Rocky Mountain National Park, so these amplify the experience. I think another whole book of poems can be written just about the headwaters area, so far from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, but so connected.
You have come to the edge in your T-shirt and tennis shoes,
And there, like nothing you had imagined,
Nothing in the pocket-sized postcards,
Is the split continent, enormous and jagged,
A terrible incision, terribly gorgeous,
The late-afternoon air pouring in
Like liquid spilled from far fissures or glacial thaw.
Joan Baranow
How much grandeur does it take until
Our eyes fall to the small life before us,
The geologic blink we call our lives?
Fred Diggs
The Colors of Darkness
Flash after flash across the horizon:
Tourists trying to take the Grand Canyon
By night. They don’t know
Every last shot will turn out black.
It takes Rothko sixty years to arrive
At the rim of his canyon.
He goes there only after dark.
As he stands at the railing, his pupils open
Like a camera shutter at the slowest speed.
He has to be patient. He has to lean
Far over the railing
To see the color as of darkness:
Purple, numb brown, mud-red, mauve
-an abyss of bruises.
At first, you’d think it was black on black
Something you son’t want to look at, he says
As he waits,
The colors vibrate in the chasm
Like voices:
You there with the eyes,
Bring back something from
The brink of nothing
to make us see.
by Chana Bloch
Thomas Moran Paints
This place gets inside you with its soft reds
And tans. You can feel the lithe sweep of brushes
Inside your head. Your empty hands moving
From side to side involuntarily. It is like seeing
An angel’s brilliancy for the first time and trying
To describe it to your own soul in a language
Of the eye your heart can understand
The light is always different here getting darker
Near the river paler near the rim. But it is
The way the canyon breathes warm air rising
Cool air settling that makes the colors vibrant
Gives them luster. I can pile and scrape paint
On a canvas forever and miss the one rare
Note that hides in the throat of a canyon wren
But I can dream that bird within me and capture
It on silk where its song will bring this magical
Secret landscape into my art on its wings.
by Daniel Williams
Grand Canyon/West
Human stories roll across the
Landscape, demanding attention, voicing
Their energy, responding to my questions;
The land only vibrates in the wind.
Or not. Rocks and lava, caught in the moment
Of fall, of flow, expose fractured
Innards and cooled heat, vibrate only rarely.
These human voices and the tales they tell
Deflect with looks,their gestures,
Their act of giving me what it can feel
Myself, or at least understand. I can’t
Put myself in the pinyon’s place, trembling
At the edge, growing at the upper end of a
Human sized bowl, the lower end a slot i peer
Through to see the river’s ribbon, its white flecked
Trail through the deepest cleft of all. I can’t know
The pinyon’s mind , though I try.
Mary Beath
Sunrise, Grand Canyon
We stand on the edge, the fall
Into depth, the ascent
Of light revelatory, the canyon walls moving
Up out of
Shadow, lit
Colors of the layers cutting
Down through darkness, sunrise as it
Passes a
Precipitate of the river, its burnt tangerine
Flare brief, jagged
Bleeding above the far rim for a split
Second I have imagined
You here with me, watching day’s onslaught
Standing in your bones-they seem
Implied in the record almost
By chance- fossil remains held
In abundance in the walls, exposed
By freeze and thaw, beautiful like a theory stating
Who we are is
Carried forward by the x
Chromosome down the matrilineal line
Recessive and riverine, you like
Me aberrant and bittersweet...
Riding the high
Colorado Plateau as the opposing
Continental plates force it over
A mile upward without buckling, smooth
Tensed, muscular fundament, your bones
Yet to be wrapped around mine-
This will come later, when I return
To your place and time...
The geologic cross section
Of the canyon
Dropping
From where I stand, hundreds
millions of shades of terra cotta, of copper
Manganese and rust, the many varieties of stone-
Silt, sand, and slate, even “green
River rock...my body voicing its immense
Genetic imperatives, human
geology falling away
Into a
Depth i am still unprepared for
The canyon cutting down to
The great unconformity, a layer
So named by the lack
Of any fossil evidence to hypothesize
About and date such
A remote time by, at last no possible
Retrospective certainties...
John Barton
Eating Fruit at the Grand Canyon- A song to make death easy
Since this great hole in earth is beyond
My comprehension and I am hungry,
I sit on the rim and eat fruit
The colors of the stone i see,
Strawberries of iron cliffs, sagebrush
melons, white sand apple, grapes
The barely purple of the stonewashed slopes,
And every color I eat is in my vision,
Colonized by my eye, by me and everyone
I have known, so vast, so remote,
That we can only gaze at ourselves, wondering
At our reaches, eat fat fruit while we
Grow calm if we can, our folded
Rocky interiors pressed upwards through
Our throats, side canyons seeming almost
Accessible, the grand river of blood
Carving us even as we sit, devouring
Color that will blush on our skin
Nourish us so that we may climb
The walls of the interior, bewildered,
Tremulous, but observant as we move
Down in, one foot, another,
careful not to fall, to fall,
The fruit fueling us in subtle
Surges of color in this vastly deep
Where birds make shadow and echo
And we have no idea
Why we cannot comprehend ourselves,
Each other, a place so deep and bright
It has no needs and we wonder
What we’re doing here on this fragment
Of galactic dust, spinning, cradled,
Awestruck, momentarily alive.
Diane Hume George
The Silence, the Sun
The silence is simpler,
Deeper even than the abyss
The Colorado
Coursing through Arizona
Graved into rock,
Hangs weightless
Everywhere
Confounding thought
Buries the canyon
Beneath the sun
Comprehending all of it,
Broods.
Even the river’s water-thunder
Does not rise to the rim.
All the blind hours
Sun chronicles shadows
Sloping over steeps of earth
Here
Where centuries come together
Still
Uncounted
In the silence
Which does not tell
Phyllis Hoge Thompson
From Many Hats
On the rim a quizzical gray-glinting hombre was telling himself
how it looked to him-the sun and the air are endless with silver tricks- the light of the sun has crimson strategy set-the changes go on in stop-watch split seconds-the blues slide down a box of yellow and mix with reds that melt into gray and come back saffron clay and granite pink- a weaving gamble of color twists on and it is anybody’s guess what is next.
A long sand-brown shawl shortens to a glimmering turquoise scarf- as the parapets and chimneys wash over and out in the baths of the sunset and the floats of the gloaming, one man says there goes God with an army of banners, and another man, Who is God and why? Who am i and why?
He told himself, this may be
Something else than what I
see when I look- how do I
know? For each man sees him-
Self in the Grand Canyon-
Each one makes his own Canyon
Before he comes, each one brings
And carries away his own Canyon-
Who knows? And how do I know?
Carl Sandburg
This World
we hear that other lands are better: we do not know.
The pines sing and we are glad. Our children play in the sand and we hear them sing and we are glad. The seeds ripen an we have them to eat and we are glad. We do not want their good lands; we want our rocks and the great mountains where our fathers lived. A Shi’vwits chief to JW Powell
Sun on red rock
Raves riding thermals
Jays crazy in the pines
Big blue mountain
On the far horizon
And here- infinite air-
Moving, opening
East-west, north-south,
Up-down, high
Over the one-way river
Pulling
The whole sky west.
What need
For any other world?
Ken Lauter
“Tonto Plateau”
Among rains resurrected as cactus
I confessed to a great River: no need to mind me,
Just say whatever you said long before this
When there was no one to hear it.
SO where time and the land
Wear the same face i listened all afternoon
And in the hustle, then whisper, then roar
Then whisper again, heard the world
And in the river’s voice the sound
Of always, pouring, pouring
Through everything we believe.
Reg Saner
time line
Little more than the width of a hair,
a feather or poem on thin paper-
enough room for my life and yours-
and we are climbing, lifted
by six million years of stone laid down,
our ancestors firmly in place
but alive as isotopes, molecules dancing,
darting, spinning, ever alive,
uncrushably, eternally alive,
and we too are almost glowing.
by David Ray
Rim
are there horizons
where there is no horizontal
where mountains fold space,
hold distance up?
embedded in a canyon
our heads tilt instinctively.
here earth meets sky,
we can reach it; the rim
does not shimmer and recede.
we lean into diagonal lives,
relieved of right angles
eyes, arms, hearts drawn
upward, vectored to ridgelines
keenly aware of the slant
of time, its shape and substance;
it is a wedge; it moves
along ray-stroked slopes;
we pass into it,
are passed over.
Laurelyn Whitt
In the river
in the river,
in the fluid,
in the wetness
of my own blood,
I know my body
is a beautiful canyon
slowly being worn down
to nothing.
and beyond my personal continent,
other bodies
and rivers lives
work with and against
each other,
seeking some final balance
between the search
for an ocean to easily and without thought
flow into
and a time allotted for this search…
and body means the soul
that lives there
housed and deserting its house
the body
by hookcrook
and random forgetfulness
of how far it can fly
without losing sight of
known topography
that place where a single life
in a time alone
at certain moment
starts to carve its way
starting
to be
to find a way to join
to make
a canyon
to the ocean.
Phillip Wofford
Grand Canyon
I speak now of that Grand Canyon
which lies within each of us. There
are pre-Cambrian rocks at the center,
the core, and talus from yesterday’s fall;
marble and granite grown hard from the
pressure and heat of heartbreak and
passion; crumbling sandstone, layer on
layer of sediment, sentiment piled on
over a lifetime’s experience. The sun
bursts on us each morning then dies
and we are in darkness, but moon shadows
tease our walls. We listen to the pulsating
rhythm of time’s river lapping at our
shores. The sandy places slide, diffuse,
move closer to the sea. A billion years
of erosion is magnifed, demagnifed into
sixty or seventy years as we measure time.
Perhaps in a million years your shinbone
will be a fossil in another Grand Canyon,
cold in a bed of rock next to mine.
Amil Quayle
GRAND CANYON
They say the layered earth rose up
Ancient rock leviathan
Trailing ages in its wake
Lifting earthness toward the sun
And coursing water cut the rock away
To leave these many-storied walls
Expose’ of ages gone
Around this breathless emptiness
More wondrous far than earth had ever known
My life has risen layered too
Each day, each year in turn has left
Its fossil life and sediments
Evidence of lived and unlived hours
The tedium, the anguish, yes the joy
That some heart-deep vitality
Keeps pressing upward toward the day I die
And Spirit cuts like water through it all
Carving out this emptiness
So inner eye can see
The soaring height of canyon walls within
Walls whose very color, texture, form
Redeem in beauty all my life has been
The darkness and the light, the false, the true
While deep below the living waters run
Cutting deeper through my parts
To resurrect my gravebound heart
Making, always making, all things new
Parker J. Palmer
The empty air,
Arias carved
Out of rocks beyond
Our puny clock
Philosophy.
Thea Gavin
Juniper trees lacing this desert landscape, the color of a pine green that rests in my dreams, thoughts yielding to elements of sun, light, heat, storms, western sky, lichen described as being as prolific and extravagant as coral, a place that creates "a peace that exists only in this place where I most belong, an interval I wholly owned." These poems capture so much of the experience, taking the indescribable beauty, the un-capturable grandeur, the stunning astonishment and gives a taste of what it feels like, sounds like, or how you breathe when above, in, on, near the Grand Canyon. I just finished a fantastic biography of John Wesley Powell who made the first runs down the canyon, and then I hiked the headwaters of the Colorado River in Rocky Mountain National Park, so these amplify the experience. I think another whole book of poems can be written just about the headwaters area, so far from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, but so connected.
You have come to the edge in your T-shirt and tennis shoes,
And there, like nothing you had imagined,
Nothing in the pocket-sized postcards,
Is the split continent, enormous and jagged,
A terrible incision, terribly gorgeous,
The late-afternoon air pouring in
Like liquid spilled from far fissures or glacial thaw.
Joan Baranow
How much grandeur does it take until
Our eyes fall to the small life before us,
The geologic blink we call our lives?
Fred Diggs
The Colors of Darkness
Flash after flash across the horizon:
Tourists trying to take the Grand Canyon
By night. They don’t know
Every last shot will turn out black.
It takes Rothko sixty years to arrive
At the rim of his canyon.
He goes there only after dark.
As he stands at the railing, his pupils open
Like a camera shutter at the slowest speed.
He has to be patient. He has to lean
Far over the railing
To see the color as of darkness:
Purple, numb brown, mud-red, mauve
-an abyss of bruises.
At first, you’d think it was black on black
Something you son’t want to look at, he says
As he waits,
The colors vibrate in the chasm
Like voices:
You there with the eyes,
Bring back something from
The brink of nothing
to make us see.
by Chana Bloch
Thomas Moran Paints
This place gets inside you with its soft reds
And tans. You can feel the lithe sweep of brushes
Inside your head. Your empty hands moving
From side to side involuntarily. It is like seeing
An angel’s brilliancy for the first time and trying
To describe it to your own soul in a language
Of the eye your heart can understand
The light is always different here getting darker
Near the river paler near the rim. But it is
The way the canyon breathes warm air rising
Cool air settling that makes the colors vibrant
Gives them luster. I can pile and scrape paint
On a canvas forever and miss the one rare
Note that hides in the throat of a canyon wren
But I can dream that bird within me and capture
It on silk where its song will bring this magical
Secret landscape into my art on its wings.
by Daniel Williams
Grand Canyon/West
Human stories roll across the
Landscape, demanding attention, voicing
Their energy, responding to my questions;
The land only vibrates in the wind.
Or not. Rocks and lava, caught in the moment
Of fall, of flow, expose fractured
Innards and cooled heat, vibrate only rarely.
These human voices and the tales they tell
Deflect with looks,their gestures,
Their act of giving me what it can feel
Myself, or at least understand. I can’t
Put myself in the pinyon’s place, trembling
At the edge, growing at the upper end of a
Human sized bowl, the lower end a slot i peer
Through to see the river’s ribbon, its white flecked
Trail through the deepest cleft of all. I can’t know
The pinyon’s mind , though I try.
Mary Beath
Sunrise, Grand Canyon
We stand on the edge, the fall
Into depth, the ascent
Of light revelatory, the canyon walls moving
Up out of
Shadow, lit
Colors of the layers cutting
Down through darkness, sunrise as it
Passes a
Precipitate of the river, its burnt tangerine
Flare brief, jagged
Bleeding above the far rim for a split
Second I have imagined
You here with me, watching day’s onslaught
Standing in your bones-they seem
Implied in the record almost
By chance- fossil remains held
In abundance in the walls, exposed
By freeze and thaw, beautiful like a theory stating
Who we are is
Carried forward by the x
Chromosome down the matrilineal line
Recessive and riverine, you like
Me aberrant and bittersweet...
Riding the high
Colorado Plateau as the opposing
Continental plates force it over
A mile upward without buckling, smooth
Tensed, muscular fundament, your bones
Yet to be wrapped around mine-
This will come later, when I return
To your place and time...
The geologic cross section
Of the canyon
Dropping
From where I stand, hundreds
millions of shades of terra cotta, of copper
Manganese and rust, the many varieties of stone-
Silt, sand, and slate, even “green
River rock...my body voicing its immense
Genetic imperatives, human
geology falling away
Into a
Depth i am still unprepared for
The canyon cutting down to
The great unconformity, a layer
So named by the lack
Of any fossil evidence to hypothesize
About and date such
A remote time by, at last no possible
Retrospective certainties...
John Barton
Eating Fruit at the Grand Canyon- A song to make death easy
Since this great hole in earth is beyond
My comprehension and I am hungry,
I sit on the rim and eat fruit
The colors of the stone i see,
Strawberries of iron cliffs, sagebrush
melons, white sand apple, grapes
The barely purple of the stonewashed slopes,
And every color I eat is in my vision,
Colonized by my eye, by me and everyone
I have known, so vast, so remote,
That we can only gaze at ourselves, wondering
At our reaches, eat fat fruit while we
Grow calm if we can, our folded
Rocky interiors pressed upwards through
Our throats, side canyons seeming almost
Accessible, the grand river of blood
Carving us even as we sit, devouring
Color that will blush on our skin
Nourish us so that we may climb
The walls of the interior, bewildered,
Tremulous, but observant as we move
Down in, one foot, another,
careful not to fall, to fall,
The fruit fueling us in subtle
Surges of color in this vastly deep
Where birds make shadow and echo
And we have no idea
Why we cannot comprehend ourselves,
Each other, a place so deep and bright
It has no needs and we wonder
What we’re doing here on this fragment
Of galactic dust, spinning, cradled,
Awestruck, momentarily alive.
Diane Hume George
The Silence, the Sun
The silence is simpler,
Deeper even than the abyss
The Colorado
Coursing through Arizona
Graved into rock,
Hangs weightless
Everywhere
Confounding thought
Buries the canyon
Beneath the sun
Comprehending all of it,
Broods.
Even the river’s water-thunder
Does not rise to the rim.
All the blind hours
Sun chronicles shadows
Sloping over steeps of earth
Here
Where centuries come together
Still
Uncounted
In the silence
Which does not tell
Phyllis Hoge Thompson
From Many Hats
On the rim a quizzical gray-glinting hombre was telling himself
how it looked to him-the sun and the air are endless with silver tricks- the light of the sun has crimson strategy set-the changes go on in stop-watch split seconds-the blues slide down a box of yellow and mix with reds that melt into gray and come back saffron clay and granite pink- a weaving gamble of color twists on and it is anybody’s guess what is next.
A long sand-brown shawl shortens to a glimmering turquoise scarf- as the parapets and chimneys wash over and out in the baths of the sunset and the floats of the gloaming, one man says there goes God with an army of banners, and another man, Who is God and why? Who am i and why?
He told himself, this may be
Something else than what I
see when I look- how do I
know? For each man sees him-
Self in the Grand Canyon-
Each one makes his own Canyon
Before he comes, each one brings
And carries away his own Canyon-
Who knows? And how do I know?
Carl Sandburg
This World
we hear that other lands are better: we do not know.
The pines sing and we are glad. Our children play in the sand and we hear them sing and we are glad. The seeds ripen an we have them to eat and we are glad. We do not want their good lands; we want our rocks and the great mountains where our fathers lived. A Shi’vwits chief to JW Powell
Sun on red rock
Raves riding thermals
Jays crazy in the pines
Big blue mountain
On the far horizon
And here- infinite air-
Moving, opening
East-west, north-south,
Up-down, high
Over the one-way river
Pulling
The whole sky west.
What need
For any other world?
Ken Lauter
“Tonto Plateau”
Among rains resurrected as cactus
I confessed to a great River: no need to mind me,
Just say whatever you said long before this
When there was no one to hear it.
SO where time and the land
Wear the same face i listened all afternoon
And in the hustle, then whisper, then roar
Then whisper again, heard the world
And in the river’s voice the sound
Of always, pouring, pouring
Through everything we believe.
Reg Saner
time line
Little more than the width of a hair,
a feather or poem on thin paper-
enough room for my life and yours-
and we are climbing, lifted
by six million years of stone laid down,
our ancestors firmly in place
but alive as isotopes, molecules dancing,
darting, spinning, ever alive,
uncrushably, eternally alive,
and we too are almost glowing.
by David Ray
Rim
are there horizons
where there is no horizontal
where mountains fold space,
hold distance up?
embedded in a canyon
our heads tilt instinctively.
here earth meets sky,
we can reach it; the rim
does not shimmer and recede.
we lean into diagonal lives,
relieved of right angles
eyes, arms, hearts drawn
upward, vectored to ridgelines
keenly aware of the slant
of time, its shape and substance;
it is a wedge; it moves
along ray-stroked slopes;
we pass into it,
are passed over.
Laurelyn Whitt
In the river
in the river,
in the fluid,
in the wetness
of my own blood,
I know my body
is a beautiful canyon
slowly being worn down
to nothing.
and beyond my personal continent,
other bodies
and rivers lives
work with and against
each other,
seeking some final balance
between the search
for an ocean to easily and without thought
flow into
and a time allotted for this search…
and body means the soul
that lives there
housed and deserting its house
the body
by hookcrook
and random forgetfulness
of how far it can fly
without losing sight of
known topography
that place where a single life
in a time alone
at certain moment
starts to carve its way
starting
to be
to find a way to join
to make
a canyon
to the ocean.
Phillip Wofford
Grand Canyon
I speak now of that Grand Canyon
which lies within each of us. There
are pre-Cambrian rocks at the center,
the core, and talus from yesterday’s fall;
marble and granite grown hard from the
pressure and heat of heartbreak and
passion; crumbling sandstone, layer on
layer of sediment, sentiment piled on
over a lifetime’s experience. The sun
bursts on us each morning then dies
and we are in darkness, but moon shadows
tease our walls. We listen to the pulsating
rhythm of time’s river lapping at our
shores. The sandy places slide, diffuse,
move closer to the sea. A billion years
of erosion is magnifed, demagnifed into
sixty or seventy years as we measure time.
Perhaps in a million years your shinbone
will be a fossil in another Grand Canyon,
cold in a bed of rock next to mine.
Amil Quayle
GRAND CANYON
They say the layered earth rose up
Ancient rock leviathan
Trailing ages in its wake
Lifting earthness toward the sun
And coursing water cut the rock away
To leave these many-storied walls
Expose’ of ages gone
Around this breathless emptiness
More wondrous far than earth had ever known
My life has risen layered too
Each day, each year in turn has left
Its fossil life and sediments
Evidence of lived and unlived hours
The tedium, the anguish, yes the joy
That some heart-deep vitality
Keeps pressing upward toward the day I die
And Spirit cuts like water through it all
Carving out this emptiness
So inner eye can see
The soaring height of canyon walls within
Walls whose very color, texture, form
Redeem in beauty all my life has been
The darkness and the light, the false, the true
While deep below the living waters run
Cutting deeper through my parts
To resurrect my gravebound heart
Making, always making, all things new
Parker J. Palmer
January 11, 2022
Going Down Grand, Poems from the Canyon, Edited by Peter Anderson & Rick Kemps (2015, 137pp). When going through Moab like I did today I always stop at Back of Beyond Books, one of the best dependent bookstores in the SW. Buying this little anthology of poems about the Grand Canyon was my modest way to support the store. Long may they live. For readers of Grand Canyon-related books, some of these writers will be familiar. While many of names were new to me, the subject matter felt quite familiar. It’s a nice and varied collection.
September 5, 2019
I don't read a lot of poetry, but this is a wonderful collection of poems about the Grand Canyon by people who are writing from their personal experiences on the rim, on the trails, and on the river. Having had my first visit to, and rafting trip in, the Canyon,a mere two months ago, I found many of the poems absolutely magical in capturing the spirit and solace of the place and time.
April 7, 2016
Interesting anthology of poetry about the Grand Canyon experience.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews