How I Learned to See Through Sand
My response to Claire Kelly’s poem is building and moving on, a bit like love longing to be thread on the “Westward Winds.”
My “heart is tangled in my hand,” but writing with you here is you helping me learn the love that holds is the lift and fold, the tucking in and unfolding flow of being — the with-you, that is me right now, inside the opening gust of cherish as it expands the viscera of soil, from star-to-heart, and reaching out, (for eons with both arms toward each end of the galaxy) one night when I was so lonely in the life left to me, you drew me back again — it was cold, but I was standing, flat-footed on the soil and felt the throbbing stars — it was too dark to see, so I felt.
Something was approaching.
I felt the light rise, the heat lift off the ground and leave a space for wind — I was all alone, and you drew me in.
That night I found your poem, “Westward Winds”
and I was clarified, not by snow, but by the coming and goingness of crystals — by the building sense of coming snow. Your clarity is like fluid glass to moment of sand. Your sentiment is mineralizing, decomposing, and as taking as westward wind is to the billowing grain
of rock that nucleates a mind, and your vision is as wide as a seed of sand in the sky that sows the mist with all the possibilities for time
to turn around inside itself, emerge a body — out of fire, stardust — out of stardust, a lifetime, love — love to vapor, and with vapor, comes an emptiness that sweeps the land, lifts it up and builds body out of wind.
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Thank You so Much for Reading!
The poem is really just the beginning of a comment I have been writing on a poem that has kept me company all December.
Claire’s poem, “Westward Winds” is so rich in beauty and fluidity that the more I read and reread, the more I gleaned from both her lines and from my own response.
My own poem grew parts-to-parts as it began to connect what I was learning — and as it built, my response turned into a longing to string her “pearls of wisdom,” until they wisely told me to look up, that it was finally time to let them go.
So, Reader, please follow along with me to see where the winds lead. If you follow my train of thought — 12 cars long, just like the coming year, (with a few interspersing side cars that jump track and wander as I ask you to wonder off me) — if you follow along, maybe you will also come to understand
not just how to see through sand, but how important it is to read Claire’s poem for yourself, to see whatever it is you find — but I promise whatever you discover there will your own life’s treasure.
So, please make sure you read Claire Kelly’s poem to see why I had to do my very best to make this tribute personal and universal.
You can click on this link to read “Westward Winds,” composed By Claire Kelly, and graciously published in Imogene’s Notebook.
P.S.
I actually found Claire’s poem one cold dark night in December — it was my 38th anniversary, but Dave was 2 years gone. Claire’s poem, “Westward Winds,” was the gift that let me hold him again, and now, even as I send my cherish back to her, I simultaneously hug him and let him go.
After two years of being lost, I am still grieving, but her exceptional writing and magic insight made me feel, with her words in mind, that “my heart was tangled in my hand.”
My husband’s life was a one-of-a-kind work of art, the kind of miracle that takes its metaphor in the (as of yet, still somewhere in the world) daily masterpiece of snow.
“Westward Winds” let me know that while my husband will always be a part of my heart, death is just part of life, and that while the process of becoming is forever building and coming, it is also the reality of already being home.
Claire Kelly’s poetry is transformational. I am so appreciative for her poem and for offering me a chance to write for her publication, Write Under the Moon.
Thank you Claire!
If you want to find out how I learned to see through sand, follow along — The train is building.
To climb aboard the next car, click here: