Footprints
By Kirby Congdon……
Footprints
I press each foot’s print in,
this beach made with stone and bone,
clean and firm,
beneath my feet
and, so, design,
with neat resolve,
hard topographies
from this shiftless land
which oceans, also,
rising, would complete
with neither eye nor hand
returning worlds, dissolved,
with an easy disregard,
into smooth, unmarked,
and, once more, unmarred
obliterations of sand.
That landscape’s script
has no language to translate.
Our body’s trace is gone.
Our lives are anonymous
when endless oceans
neither feel nor think.
Yet we ambulate
with head held high,
through a nameless waste,
while the mind’s eye
and all its words,
define a world,
as, out of time,
we find our place
wirh its meaning shared
in a name that’s only ours
within that endless sea
far beyond the nameless numbers
of all those countless stars.