October 24, 2012
A poem
by James Goldberg
(CC) McKay Savage
When we first saw the dust they’d use to make our bodies,
we shouted with the stars for joy.
Such fine, solid stuff–to serve as soil for the trees
and shape temples for our souls.But if we’d known then how it tastes to dwell in earth,
we’d have bowed our heads in reverent awe
for the beauty of the delicate silt
that flows around us through these
fragile, faith-filled,
fleeting
years.
*Image: banyan tree in Kolkata (largest canopy in the world) – this is all one tree, supported now by its prop-roots as the trunk has rotted and been removed.
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Love the banyan photo. In Tainan, Taiwan, there is a banyan “forest” of sorts at the site of an old Dutch salt warehouse where it is difficult to tell where one tree ends and another begins. (Now I wonder if they really begin or end…)
“fragile, faith-filled, / fleeting / years.” Beautiful. Hard to read those words aloud without digesting each one in turn. Lovely.
Beautiful. Seriously.
My favorite line: “how it tastes to dwell in earth”