Maybe our life is an affair of coastlines,
of touching on contours, of sand shifting
underfoot, of footprints straying
a shoreline. No epitaph in granite,
no marble eminence, no limestone
subtlety. Tracking my prints back
is recovering tides’ clean sweep,
the cleansing services of storms’ and winds’
abrasive erasures. The only line
that matters in the end is forward
since home is what we find when we find
what it is, they say. Still, standing on the edge
of stone seven thousand kilometres wide,
my back to a whole past vivid to my eyes,
I wonder why, here, it should suddenly begin.

Author: Andrew Taylor