Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘salt’

The Tide is High

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 4, 2021| 8 Comments » 

lyrics from "The Tide Is High" by John Holt, 1967
           
 
Something about the unsinkable reggae beat,
and in just three notes, I’m again my young self,
dancing alone in my bedroom,
singing as if I am one with the song,
as if it were written just for me,
 
I’m not the kind of girl
who gives up just like that, oh no, oh!
 
And singing it now on a Sunday afternoon,
I’m caught in a surprise riptide of joy
and start to lilt around the room,
though just moments ago I was weeping,
buried beneath the salt of worry,
 
but here I am, dancing alone,
hips rocking, my shoulders a rolling sea,
my voice surfing above the bright swell of trumpets.
 
The tide is high but I’m holding on.
 
Sometimes a song is a lifeline,
not because it pulls me out of the water,
but because it tosses me deeper in,
and I feel I’m no longer trapping myself
in a life the size of a teacup—
 
no, in this moment I am oceanic,
an Atlantic of joy, a Pacific of wonder
vast enough to hold everything,
and the tide is high
and all that salt only makes me more buoyant
as I play in the generous waves.

Read Full Post »

Becoming Crystalline

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 8, 2018| Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

Forgive me. I do not mean

to be sharp, stark, sterile.

I’ve read of the salt mines

 

at Salzburg, how if you throw

a stick, leafless and dead,

into one of the abandoned workings,

 

then return months later and pull it out,

it will be covered in crystals,

“a galaxy of scintillating diamonds,”

 

writes Stendahl, “the original

branch no longer recognizable.”

I want to be like that stick.

 

Take my winter soul

and throw it into the mystery,

though it’s dark and cold

 

and easy to get lost.

What knows how to attract

the light will grow, will change me

 

until I barely recognize myself.

I do not mean to be short,

but I hear it in my words.

 

Stranger things have happened.

What is dead is sometimes

a chance to find new life,

 

to become a thing shining,

something the same, only fresh,

a thousand times more brilliant.

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

Eating the Soup without Salt

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 30, 2012| 5 Comments »

Something is missing.
At least that is what

the palate says. Though
so much is here. Nudge

of onion. Wink of cumin.
The lentil’s warm shrug.

It is like, perhaps,
a person who, feeling

a certain emptiness
longs to fill it with

a voice. Though all
around him, voices,

not hers.
The soup is warm,

but not there the spark,
the sharp song, the crystalline chime.

It is easy to taste
mostly absence. We are

hard wired to want it,
to crave it, adore it.

We’ve evolved
alongside of our need.

No one wants to hear
they can’t have what

they want. We cannot
untaste what we’ve tasted.

They say we are mostly
made of emptiness.

Sometimes I understand.

Read Full Post »

%d