From my California, my great land

of gold and complications, wilderness,

enormous cities built on faults,

austere, bizarre, and inexhaustible

vineyards, valleys crowded with visions.

To your Georgia of red dirt farms,

where trees are all one green,

a bony piney sandy silence,

your Georgia of slow rivers, graves,

islands, that quiet place.

How could I come with all my California?

I see them come with open hands,

transparent, sharing everything,

giving and cleaving, nothing kept,

the emigrants that leave their motherland

for love and never look behind.

But if I would, how could I give you

California? And I have to live

there, working the creeks my veins for gold.

Or you, could you leave Georgia,

leaving your bones behind,

and give me more than silence?

So we have made these no-one’s-lands

by meeting where we never know

when we shall meet or not,

like spies or pioneers,

telling the news in low voices

down in the willow coulees

in a grey evening, inland.

We met at sea, we married

in a foreign language, what wonder

if we cross a continent on foot

each time to find each other

at secret borders, bringing

of all my streams and darknesses of gold

and your deep graves and islands.

A feather

a flake of mica

a willow leaf

that is our country,

ours alone.

~Ursala K. Le Guin