The Miracle in the Sand

You were picked
the same way
the sand was picked.
To boost up
the physical earth,
and have meaning for
the non-physical.

Whose boulders
did you crumble from?
When bomber jets
blimped through the early morning sky
what origins did you think of?
What’s the original
material of your slough? Years
to me seem like waiting
or kernels of corn on the
cob. All in a row there
waiting to be popped, bitten into,
gnawed on.

It’s a blackbird finding
a fossil and thinking it’s
food, biting it and
learning from its bowed
backbone, some little early
mammal that died in a
prehistoric field, roughage
still in stomach, ears still
up.

Never mind the flowing
of the sea, it’s some hundred
miles off, and its voice can’t
carry through. But its movement
is the movement of sand,
slowly miming the way time
moves, and showing us how that
happens.