Article voiceover
Standing on the shore, I watch the tide ebb. I’ll miss the water but I know it’ll return. Standing in the forest, I hear the birds go silent. I miss their songs but I know they’ll return. Day by day, I watch the sun and moon rise and fall. I miss each of them when they’re gone but I know they’ll return. But people are more unpredictable. It’s difficult to say this but sometimes people go away and don’t come back. I wish all people were the tide returning. I wish all people were bird songs returning. I wish all people were the sun and moon returning. So let’s praise those people who do come back. They might leave for minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years, but they return. We open the door and there they are— as beautiful as water, as enchanting as song, as embracing as moon, and as life-giving as sun.
Thank you for returning to our lives, Sherman Alexie. We are so glad to be finding such poems in our morning ritual. This one reminds me again how poetry, this kind of poetry, can bless us with the beautiful part of being human, the healing, the sharing, the reaffirmation of joy. A kind of christening.
Oh, Sherman! I forwarded your poem to a friend this morning, and got this is return:
"THANK YOU! I will return to New Mexico this fall even though I am not
as beautiful as water,
as enchanting as song,
as embracing as moon,
and as life-giving as sun."
I wrote back to tell her that, yes, she is. She wrote back to me:
"Did you ever read Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian? Among other virtue, it has a laugh out loud scene about teenage boy masturbation.
PS# 2 the photograph looks like one of my local beaches"
She's in Mendocino.
I love your poem, and I love how it has connected me and my friend on yet another mutual passion--the rock-star Sherman Alexie.
May I say,
love,
Nancy