Prints

Sundays are for ice cream...

(Sandy Truth, II)

Truth be told, my footprints aren’t that deep.
I’m walking through a sandy, sliding beach, and
yes, a shape remains, but only just -
the slightest breeze tousles the outline, slides the edges down 
until the dip reforms to easy 
curves and where I walked is 
rippled back to glittered
shabby thrift, 
a surface made for anyone to visit, where the grains
expect erasure, rather than indelible
impressions I might keep. 

The particles are laughing, as they roll and shrug their angled
shoulders, jostling to a level that their complex
geometric forms can take, until
a deer walks by and presses down and out and 
carves a cloven oval, hushing their hilarity
for just a beat -

but -

the sand is never serious. It 
holds its posture just as long as each exuberant congregant
can take, which isn’t very long, and then the day resumes its 
general lazy drift. The clouds roll by, and shade, and then the sun comes out and
dries the air still more. The glass reflects.

The moisture that could deepen, has to 
lift.

I think my Soul is like a sandy trail. It’s warm and full of 
tiny mirrored grains, willing to move and even hold 
a little stamp of something beautiful or
cold or hot or new or strange or simply there to see…
and yet the shapes don’t last.
I blur the edges of my memory.

The water isn’t there to press the fragments tight
and keep the faith,
or what it is that holds an afterthought.
The surface waiting to be written on
needs more than sandy ribbons for the
text to overcome its 
tendency to shift.

Or else I need to think in terms of depth below the trail,
below the jack pine sand and scrubby grass and 
lichen hanging on with prickly grip.
I need a tool to dig my entered sights and sounds
and thoughts and feelings deep under this slippery, laughing
temporary plane;
so deep the wind can’t find a corner or a
rift,
and I can come again as evening falls
and study what walked through my Soul and 
pause…

the images will stay, to hold a moment 
for as long as moments take to clarify themselves as 
curses, or as blessings, or as 

just a passing herbivorous
gift.

~ Lynn Lundell, ©2026