"It is your choice,"

thus said

our heavenly ancestor

to his children:

"without words

you can be a bird,

an intersection of soil and light and wind.

Without flight,

VERSE

embodying love and freedom and death,

this, my only inheritance for you.

Thus

he put the open book of heavenly verse

- its pages

repeating waves of ambiguity -

on the ground

and the first sea

appeared.

Birds

over the first sea

migrated en masse.

Shadows of their open wings

on the book of seas

- image of immortality

on the slippery mirror of moments -

became

the verses

of the first terrestrial poem.

I stood

before the sea

- the hands of desire

falling short of the sky -

and the wings of dreams

swept away the birds

...until the waves

taught me the first poem.