Along a mountain trail
beside the Clackamas,
buried in wooded beaches
rimming the Columbia,
lying in high dunes
between Sand Lake and the Pacific
you left fragments of your soul
remaining in time,
I find the shards
embedded in earth.
Picking them up,
desiccated and brittle,
I recall the days of their making,
then weightless
I lift them to the sky,
blow my breath
across the fragments
and they’re gone,
airborne and returned
to the timeless.
No gravestone or marker,
no imprint of the sacred,
just time bound links
on the long chain of life.
Consciously letting go of the past…beautiful…….
This ritual and place specific poem really speaks to me. If you don’t already, I recommend subscribing to Windfall: A Journal of Place http://www.hevanet.com/windfall/
and submitting this poem.
We Belong ~ ~
excellent Don – spare, clean, clear and transparent like the mountain winds – “therefore their actions left no trace and there was no record of their affairs.”
Thank you Don. Even there, impermanence prevails. My track in mud will water a seedling and my step shall return to non-identify.
As an Indian swami said to me once: “Where is there to go?” It’s always all here shaping and reshaping in an endless process of presence and absence. Or as Rilke said, “To have been one with the earth, even if only once, once and no more, this is beyond undoing.” Same thing really.
Beautiful and very timely!
I was thinking just this AM about my own father who has been gone since 1994. The question popped into my head, “is he really gone, completely gone, without a trace”? I thought about his impact on me, my family and many, many others who he touched in his work as a physician who cared deeply for his patients and it was clear to me his impact is still there. The effects of his words, empathy, care, moral support and more may be diffuse, scattered, hard to point to but still there nonetheless, not forgotten . “No gravestone or marker, no imprint of the sacred, just time bound links on the long chain of life” says it very clearly.
Thanks for your words, as always.
Lovely. Personal memory, and yet universal.
Beautiful, Don. And thanks for the poem that Lou Rotola read at the memorial service for Ken.