I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you.— T.S. Eliot
We do, each of us, move like the sun
from one crest to another.
Though some have learned to turn,
follow shadows in the evening--
go where they lean.
There, they say, in the dark pockets that form
as we stride, where the light can't quite
touch the ground, we might find a spare second (or two)
cresting like an opal in the sand.
And some, in turning, have learned to pause.
Secure with Venus rising at their back, they watch
the land bleed into sky as night falls and the two become
indistinguishable.
They are the ones who don't fear the dust,
because sometime long ago they learned to play with it,
to gather it up in fists and pour it over their scraped
and bug-bitten legs until they felt the earth pulse
beneath their skin.
They are the ones whose feet, untethered,
lift from the warm red dirt.
They cannot say which way is up or which is down
or where the wind will take them.
Left with the imprint of an eastward gaze,
they can only imagine where they are and what they will do
and whose arms they hear
stroking the air beside them.
They are the ones who have found the question
half buried on the path: what happens when
the land becomes the sky?
They are the ones who say,
there is wonder
in a handful of dust.
June 8, 2025
For my nephew on the day of his birth.