GREG HOBBS
———————————
Colorado
Mother of Rivers
When I was young the waters sang
of being here before I am,
of falling sweet and soft and slow
to berry bog and high meadow.
And held me in her lap and cooed
the willow roots, the gaining pools,
and called me through bright dappled grass
and called me O, My Shining One;
And shaped a bed to lay me on
and played the flute so high and clear.
And shape the stones to carry me,
when I am young and full of fight
for roaring here and roaring there,
for pouring torrents in the air.
When I am young as mountain snow
in crag and cleft and cracked window;
I call the green-backed cutthroat trout,
I call the nymph and hellgrammite,
I call the hatch to catch a wind,
I call upon the mountain track;
I call the scarlet to the jaw
as morning calls her own hatchlings,
call Yampa, White, the Rio Grande,
San Juan, the Platte, the Arkansas.
-- in celebration of the 30th year
of Colorado's instream flow law
[83]
You Put Your Noodle
You put your noodle
to the work of translating
the dish into a dish worth tasting.
It's like this: Some will say it's barely
palatable; others, yep, there's zest to it;
a few will say, that's great, I'd like some more.
None, perhaps, will see immediately the work,
the art required to string and string again
Liberty, Hope, Justice, getting up in the
morning to go at it all over again.
-- for James R. Elkins on teaching, practicing,
and judging as an art
[84]
Gregory Hobbs is a Justice on the Colorado Supreme Court. He was born
in Gainesville, Florida in 1944. His father was in the Air Corps and then
the Air Force and the family was stationed at various places around the
country, and especially in the West. Hobbs ended up studying history at
Notre Dame, where he graduated in 1966. He went on to graduate school at
Columbia University, and finding New York more compelling than graduate
school he spent a semester getting to know New York and dropped out of
graduate school. He taught sixth grade for a semester at St. Paul's Catholic
School in Manhattan which was, he reports, the hardest job he ever held
in his life. After a year in the Peace Corps in Latin America, Hobbs came
back to the United States to study law at Berkeley in the fall of 1968.
After law school, he clerked for Judge William Doyle on the 10th Circuit
and took up private practice in San Francisco. Missing the mountains of
Colorado, he moved back to Denver in October, 1973 where he joined the
Environmental Protection Agency doing air pollution enforcement. He then
moved to the Colorado Attorney General's Office.
Eventually, Hobbs returned to private practice, joining Davis, Graham,
& Stubbs in 1979 where he started working for the Northern Colorado
Water Conservancy District and became their general counsel. In 1996 Hobbs
was appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court by former Governor Roy Romer.
Colorado voters retained him for a 10-year term which expires in 2009.
Hobbs has been writing poetry for over 30 years, focusing on the West--its
mountains, plains and rivers. |
