2 poem by VIRGINIA BARRETT

INTO AN EARLIER WORLD
She passed through five hundred sunsets
until the rock around her gathered the color
to keep it, all through the night and day.
It was new land to her—land where the water
had circled, pressed, smoothed, and shaped
sand into arches and statues, ridges and canyons
before it had disappeared.
The sun hot, she wore a hat with a brim as wide
as a small pond so that she had to tilt her head sometimes
to walk between the narrow walls in the labyrinth
of the fiery furnace. She did not get lost,
for there was nowhere to lose, only people,
places, and things.
After one thousand years of walking she found herself
on a white, open rock; her body dripping
with so much sweat that she laid her hat down
and swam in it, remembering to feed the fish she would later
eat with piñon nuts she had picked along the way.
With each wide stroke she took the pond grew larger
until she could not swim it all and fell weary,
longing to walk again on the red-yellow rocks
with secret holes inside.
She made a flat-bottom boat from yucca leaves,
remembering a friend she once had on the highest lake
there ever was who wove fat canoes and lived on a floating
island of reed. Her boat served her well and she paddled
for two thousand years with the crooked limbs
of junipers until finally she reached the shore.
The statues she had known before wore stranger faces
now, the ridges rose higher, the canyons dug deeper,
and the arches stretched more long.
The arches stretched into entire landscapes of their own
and she walked on one, up and over, into an earlier world.

NIGHTS ON THE BEACH
I felt it shelter to speak to you.
Emily Dickinson
There are nights on the beach
when you beg the ocean to tell you where you belong
There are nights on the beach
when the tide urges you to be lost at sea
There are nights on the beach
when a wave soaks more than your new red shoes
There are nights on the beach
when you sense all the rocks wounds
There are nights on the beach
when the moon is your only waning friend
There are nights on the beach
when each grain of sand seems to shift against you . . .
And there are nights on the beach
when you find a fire carefully laid and ablaze
in a cove with no one
a night of surreal warmth with no Pacific wind
a night when a man from that land meets you
spontaneous and sweet
to massage your rough
and weary feet—giving you
shelter
until dawn
…..
VIRGINIA BARRETT; a poet, writer, artist and singer-songwriter
based in San francisco.