Judith Sanders: First Lesson

Children, if I told you I’d teach you

everything you need to know,

would you know to be suspicious?

Take this pebble here.  One, you say, 

of many.  All mere chips of boulders, 

once jagged, now polished 

in the tumbler of tide-churned sand.

Good.  Yet I will teach you

which to lift from the multitude 

along the shore, how to close your eyes 

and assess this particular pebble’s 

cool weight in your palm,

the diameter of its smoothness,

the course it traveled over the seabed, 

what will happen if you take it home.

How its jewel glint will dull as it dries.

How your fingers will rediscover it 

in the linty depths of a pocket 

and how you will wonder why 

this lump mattered enough 

to carry it so far.  How perhaps, 

even still, it will recall to you 

the array of scattered stones, 

the fanning waves, the granular sands, 

wet, then dry, on your unshod feet,

the seal heads popping up, 

the sweep of cloudless sky.

How you stood there, 

among the wheeling seabirds,

and grasped momentarily

how time moves and stands still, 

how you are as broad as the universe

and as minuscule, as fragile, 

as the fractured, discarded shells,

half-buried in the shifting hillocks,

which could cut your mortal sole.

How you too are one dull chip 

off the old block of primal matter

among countless strewn millions

tumbled and worn by tides,

yet you too are matchless 

when gleaming.  That’s what

this lesson can teach you.

Ready?  Open your book.

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Copyright 2020 Judith Sanders