Desert Wind

“The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Shelley, Ozymandias.

Ah… And there it is, my friend— “A disembodied thought,”
Found, we’re told, under a soldier’s boot,
Though some have said it is not a thinkingness
But a yearning for the life that held it.

And there, just there, a bit of quartz
As white as cataracts
As final rays of sunlight, once
Caught and held— As black clouds
Boil across an afternoon sky
Eclipse the sun and day falls into night.

Or so the lone survivor told.
But she was blind, it’s said.
She lived another day or two
The legend goes, to say who won.

Though who would care, I wonder?
Surely not the dead.

But we, the living, speak: release the past to where
All pasts must dwell, recover hope, however faint,
Rekindle life, wherever present, harken to a living
Wind, attend its voices— those of Jesus, Allah,
HaShem, L. Ron Hubbard, and others.

And having listened and formed our own thoughts
And consulted with prayer and vision,
Rejoin, rejoice, retake our own lives,
Today, we are returned.
Today we are alive— and come and go in peace.