Footprints, par Laura Brown

Footprints

we saw your burnished footprints

in the soft beach sand

followed them across the sea

and through the shattered sky beyond

‘one small step for man’, he said

‘one giant leap for mankind’

trading bread for footprints in the sand

Me: I love to drive He: it’s too damn dangerous safer to fly, statistics prove it

Still they knock at my door And complain About the state of the world Selling fear Like grape Kool Aid

inhumanity kills boys civilization kills girls

come sit beneath my branches and read to me from dead poets for I am old all texture and symmetry a conspiracy of cocoons

a great blue heron watches from a mogul of grass as I scavenge a poem from the marsh Tom Peepety calls

looking at the world through drops of counterfeit lace on the window pane

we don’t know who he said he was we came from curiosity and stayed for the inhumanity

how pathetic to be born without wings such gifts should be for womankind, too

Early morning mist Loon fishing quiet water Shining wake behind

Nature’s snowy gown Melts into a silky pool Spring’s passion awakes

The taste of winter ice Dug in August from the sawdust Of Conley’s ice house The slap of the screen door On Grammy’s porch

wind tangled trees coiling across a yellow moon spiraling leaves surf-curled dunes

silent universe solitary traveller a perfect union

WINTER SHADOW / Feb 11, 2011 small white stones fall rattling to the ground a shadow keeps pace beside me through the groaning night

I remember the summer of the polio scare we couldn’t go to the cove to swim that whole summer