Today’s prompt was the Two of Earth from Volume 1 (As Above) of the Book of Shadows Tarot. (Click here to see the card.) One of the gifts of this month of writing is that I seem to be experimenting with forms I don’t usually employ. I’m not much of a prose poetry fan, but this poem just refused to make sense any other way.
Tide pool
My feet hurt. This journey took much longer than I was told, took much more out of me than I expected. I had not felt my years before, not much, but now I feel older than the rocks, older than the mountains where I was born. But not older than the ocean on whose glowing edge I now sit, whose waters soothe my aching feet and reflect the marbled morning sky. It is a marvel, a vastness that moves and sighs like an animal, a form of life so different from the mountains. I know stone in all its expressions, its origins and transformations. I know the secrets it holds, how to uncover them and use them. But this, this! This expanse that has no shape but shapes and is shaped by what it touches, that changes moment to moment and somehow seems unchanged, unchangeable – this ocean frightens me. How can one understand such strangeness? And faced with such mystery, how can one not yearn to spend a lifetime discovering it?
Welcome, global readers and poets!
The Daily Compost 