For Me, Dust

For me, dust is as much a sacrament
As bread. At dawn dust is disturbed
Cool by life; at dusk it settles silently
As life retires, as sunset goes to sleep.

I like this grit as much as mud. It has a spirit
In the wind and in the hand. It’s siftable,
Riseable, sinkable and sandable,
Its meter and its rhythm from another being borne.

Summer dust recalls to mind
The little person I once was: the me
That journeyed childhood’s way into the woman
I now am, in sunlight.

Road dust has received the print of pilgrim toes
To stir silt into clouds: to bathe in it,
To have it in the clothes, the folds
Surrounding skin, and in the flesh itself.

And lightly it pervades, so lightly, to act a witness
To the every gritty disturbance that is travel
As on the road not fully settling back, but some clinging
To come along for the ride. And into dust we shall return.