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.