In a world of steel-eyed death and men who are fighting to be warm, Seth Haines' writing is a shelter from the storm. I'm grateful to host his words here today.
1.
We move first through the rail thin hope of light,
potential coming through the needle’s eye
and into the growing, breaking, blinding dawn
of the first day.
From water to air, pushed or pulled
I do not know which, we come
to the great magnet that is this living,
this undulating of ocean tides
and carnal impulse.
2.
We learn to climb, breathless,
to roll down sand dunes
and into the shell beds
at the bottoms of every hill
just there, at the foot of the ocean.
If we are still, we feel the pull into sand,
the calling of dust to dust, tide to tide.
Overhead, the gulls fly against the trade winds
in a V. Cutting against the invisible,
do they look down and envy
our oneness with dust?
3.
Elders, we keep watch for the narrowing,
closing golden gate. Dusk thinning,
the light becomes again rail-thin
or invisible, and the gentle call
brings us to the best memories of sand dunes
and shell beds, the switch grass that stands
at the edges of the tides.
Here the gulls fly north again for the last winter.
Here, sweet envy turns the eye upward
to longing for oneness with the eternal sky.
There is again the pushing and pulling of tides
as ears press finally against the fighting conch
that was the best of life.
Seth Haines is a working stiff from the Ozark mountains. He and his wife Amber Haines have four boys and a dog named Lucy. Seth enjoys good sentences, good music, good food, good fly fishing, and a good book every now and then. You can find him on a regular basis at sethhaines.com.
had its official release this month, but I was lucky enough to receive my own copy when Sarah and I met up at our alma mater last May.
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