A sand puzzle

Hi all!

Here's a more philosophical piece of poetry I wrote as a teenager (translated into English today) on the topic of imagination presented as a puzzle made of sand, and how it affects the one creating/writing, how it creates a world out of nothing, and how that world will relates to others and will continue to exist after the source of the imagination is gone (if it gets written down).

Yet, life is fleeting, life is large because it's small, life is sand.

Voila!

Source

A SAND PUZZLE

The make-believe flower smells the sweetest.

I hold it, made of sand, in my arms made of sand;
flesh and blood is something we’ve both heard of,
perhaps from florists who spoke in riddles,
whose hands were not leaves, yet puzzle pieces.

You and I are desert-ers, we have nomads for thoughts,

we’ve wandered far and further still, we’ve come apart,
split, halved – each holding something half-full,
be it a glass or an hourglass, it needs filling up,
it needs a vase to return to, perhaps some soil.

I’m the center piece of that puzzle of sand:

I stand surrounded by dust and dirt
and shadows of horses and their riders
demanding payment of some sort or else,
as I have nothing of real worth to give

surrounded by smells and versed sentences.

Are you and I cursed to crumble into dust
under the soaring sun and vindictive heat?
Are you and I the bodies of sadness,
the shapes of an eroded reality?

Quiet and made-up, a smooth petal of sand,

What is and what will be left of me will bloom –
all of it imagined yet sought after, like sand,
you think it won’t happen to you until
a sandstorm invades your eyes

and leaves you in the middle of a sand puzzle.

30 MAY 2002

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So, do you think I've managed to capture well (at all?) the ideas I've introduced in the lead-in to the poem?

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