A Small Pile of Resurrections

Just leave me here for a time. A day. A week. More.
Leave me in the off-season, when no one is here,
when the weather is so rugged people flee
to their warm homes, and the landscape is left
to be what it was made to be.

Leave me here. I will simply sit. Perhaps alone.
Perhaps with the one I love.
Without the need for words
or the false colors of summer.
Just me. The waves. The horizon.
Raw sand without footprints.
Except of course, yours.

Leave me here a while.
Where the sand fences lay half-buried
and the seagrass is burrowed in for the season.
Where the crabs poke their heads out of the sand,
suddenly safe, and dance,
their tiny footprints sketching in the sand.
Leave me, long enough for the tide to go and come back again,
for the landscape to change before my eyes
and yet somehow, stay the same.

Leave me here. It is my emptying out place.
Where the filth of my soul dissipates like morning mist.
Where I become pure again. Not perfect, never that,
but pure. New. Leave me here, and when I go,
I will pick up one white stone,
and place it with the others, a small pile of resurrections,
come and gone and come again.

About this poem

If you ever ride in my old Isuzu Trooper, you will notice a small collection of perfectly white stones in a cubby in the center console. They come from my various trips to Cape Cod, little reminders, my own little zen temple that prompts me to remember the feeling I get when I go there. Peace. Emptying out. Beginning again.

Tom