“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?” — Lawrence Durrell
The sea was one…
The sea was one,
its places were many in the
occasions they provided…
Lesson one.
It was here and now
and it was simply there,
front and center or
just behind the curtains
of our mind…
Lesson two.
It carried the same chemical
compounds as our blood,
but that was knowledge
acquired later,
explaining
why
lessons one and two
still endure…
Lesson three.
The sea
always asks for fresh
attention
because the sea,
as life,
Is sacred.
*
Rocks have no imagination…
Rocks have no imagination encapsulated
in them;
born as they are
of the tectonic necessity to accommodate
movement of the earth’s crust.
Stones, on the other hand
come out of rocks
as an act of imagination
brought forth
by ingenuity.
Nature may do as she likes,
man is the only one,
as Ben Shahn wrote,
to add surprise …
may I add:
for our pleasure!
Saying so
is akin to saying:
we see our nature
inscribed in the stones
shaped by our
imagination …
Much to our
surprise,
and borrowed pleasure.
*
We did not come from Ur…
We did not come from Ur.
We just drifted in like the
sand on the patriarch’s soles.
We were a different kind of sand.
Closer to the beach
than to the desert,
we took to the water’s edge
better than to the wind crossed
dunes.
Like so much
social mulch
we traded and
prayed for the
desert soil to bloom;
but the sap was running low
and the seeds were
spilled like so many
grains of sand
in wounded souls.
“What kind of bird
would now be born
to the wounded
one?”
— H. Dorion
Bibliographic note
Dorion, H. Ravir: les lieux, La Différence, 2005
Durrell, L. Justine, Faber and Faber, London, 1960
Credit feature image to Maurice Amiel
