The golden curl of sandstone rock,
the sound of sea as it fills
beneath a hollow ledge,
the graceful line of her leg
as she steps into the tide;
answers to the many questions
from the bones in my thumb
throbbing in the old break
to the hollowness in my gut
as I turn to leave this place.
Even the crows don’t know
and if they did they wouldn’t tell
a two legged here for an hour
before the sun goes down
and the earth returns to silence.
lovely stuff, Don! Brings to mind this passage by Ranier Maria Rilke – advise he gave a young poet in a letter: “If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Thanks for sharing your beautiful reflection, Don.
This is a beautiful meditation and it offers me solace. Thank you.
Complete,even down to your trusting relationship with the crows.
I am drawn back to that silence within myself. Just at peace.
Don…again, wonderful, rich imagery……I an so thankful for your blessed work…..D.
What is “silence” anyway?. Absence of 2-legged chatter? Soundlessness? Absence of internal 2-legged chatter?
Or, soundfulness, so harmonic as to cancel out multiple sounds, leaving only the One Tone? I think I have been there once…or twice. It is so sacred that it doesn’t belong in memory; its not for replay…it gives shape to a lifetime.
Thank you for inspiring, Don. We, your friends, ARE your returning cycle.
A lovely read at the end of the day, Don. Thanks for drawiing me into your experience of quiet awareness of the nature that surrounded you. I will have a peaceful
This has an elegiac quality to it that I also often feel at the beach. I esp. like “the bones in the thumb that throb from an old break.”..that level of specifc detail carries the poem home here where it belongs. Also appreciated Marco’s addition of Rilke!