Walking on Air

Friends,

Today I was to have gathered 500 miles from my home with the women among who I was a girl, then a dreamy adolescent, a writer of poems and singer of songs.   COVID cautions keep us in our respective cities and countries, and not at our much-anticipated reunion.  But I miss them, think of them, and of the girls we were, and want to share this in honor of them, and of a time long past but still beloved.

Namaste

 

Walking on Air

 

In her crimson velvet shoes

she tells of traveling across an ocean

to the place where she began,

and finding it gone – the fields,

the greenhouses, windows shattered,

moss removed for pavers,

apartments for the workers and their children.

 

She had become, she saw, a line

in the geological record,

thinned to, nearly, air

in a man-made world where

few filaments of dream, or letters, or journals

remain, no beams from the gadget in one’s hand.

 

She walked the solid ground

as long as it held, and then

stepped off, revealing a woman

who stitched sunlight to her fingers,

fused into the pages of those books

she had loved,

transporting us, stragglers from the ancient ways,

to those streams flashing in woven beams

in the sultry summer air.