Bone (A Soul)

1

One day I went down to the beach
and lay on the cool sand, my ears heard it singing.
Or maybe it was the surf, or the beetles in the grass.
I closed my eyes and felt the vibration of its tenor
stirring me to love, love, love, trust, or just
awakening me to acknowledge it.

2

My bones sunk into the sand
and rested against its language,
their thousand pages of words telling me
I am like them, and of belonging, and of god.
I never prayed but lifted a mussel shell to the sun.
I felt its hard edge against my hand as sand grains
blew over me. It was curved like my ear and
I think it heard me with its multitudinous blues
and pearlescent insides not unlike my own.
I think it may have heard the ocean
calling it home, because I heard it.

3

And I think we became sisters
in that moment and got to know each other
as kindred souls although I didn’t touch a soul
only a shell, an exoskeleton of a once alive thing
surrounded by other things once as alive as myself
and gulls or crabs stirring its rest crackling it
into the other broken things that were
once alive.

4

I heard the wind unsettling these things,
I heard it again in the dunes.
It cupped my ears as it blew and
in this way I knew:
The soul is a sum of many things;
that what I heard was simply
the sound of those many things.
That what I heard was
simply a soul.

        .....

#MaryOliver