Seeing Poem by David Saltaire

Sometimes
a seam in a rock
a movement of separation
can hold my imagination
I slip into quiet suspension
my mind spins itself backwards
tracing the past.

How many tens of thousands
of years wound the planet,
how many gentle centuries
lapped the sands that hardened,
how many grindings of the plates
pushed up this moment of the shore,
how many millions of gallons
of earthly seablood washed over you,
softly planed you,
how many millions of days
sent sunwaves to bake you tawny brown?

My soft flesh will dry and decay
and the winds will scatter
my bones, like chaff.
A multitude of lives
will rush across you lightly
fingers of ghosts like constellations
caressing your smooth hard face.
We traded eternity for life
you kept the everlasting
but are mute

except to me.

As you murmur your song
in my straining ear
I point my lens and set the exposure
I try not to tremble as I
silently give you my promise
to paint you in honest colors
with the available light
and show them how wrong they are
when they say that Heaven
is somewhere else.