Grounded

I know, I know--it seems like Alex Shapiro has started up yet another blog site; but actually that is not entirely true. She contributes to this one effortlessly by just posting comments on NOTES FROM THE KELP, and then I, in my way, take her prose, her comments, and tweek them, and reprocess them. She has the eye of a poet although she has never fully realized it. It is important to understand that for her, composing music is a total body and total spiritual process, and her writing, her sketching, her photography, all contribute to the music that pours out from within her, that magnificent magma that scortches us all, searing its message within our aura.

Grounded

A signature
of this island
is the impressive amount
of driftwood
that wanders
to its shores.

Not just
small branches
flung by a few gusts afar
to become suddenly afloat,
but entire trees
blown over and out
to sea
from violent storms;
and very large logs
that tumble
from barges while en route
to a less sandy substrate.

Our beaches
are a repository
for the thousands
of stories
those wooden immigrants
might tell.

I’ve arrived
to these shores,
right alongside
of the driftwood—
all of us
no longer
at sea,
no longer
adrift.
Home.

Alex Shapiro March 2008