I AM

There is a type of Irish poetry called the “boast.” The poem is a series of statements; the poet claims to have been or to have been many things in creation. Tom Cowan in Yearning for the Wind.

 

Perhaps the form can be used another way too. Not a boast so much as an expression of your unity with your family; its history and the land where you live. Perhaps even the lands where your ancestor’s might have lived.

 

I am fire from the heart of the earth;

I am the sun, caught in flowing stone;

I am a pillar of steam, born when glowing stone met foaming breakers;

I am a cloud, gray white and heavy with rain;

I am a drop of rain, fresh water become salt;

I am a wave breaking on wind whipped cliffs;

I am a grain of sand caught in the ebb and flow of the tides:

I am the land;

I am the sea;

Here I am home.

 

This is my take on living in a part of the world caught between the hammer of Oregon’s volcanic heritage and the anvil of that great western ocean. That wonderful, wild not so Pacific Ocean.