Chapter 6 · The Spirit Remembers

Sand

Cristina do Valle Mirrors of the Infinite

Sand… as far as thought can lean, As far as footsteps fade unseen, As long as time forgets to be. It scalds the tender traveler’s feet, And murmurs storms through buried dreams. We shape our citadels in air, Pretend their arches will not tear, That wind will spare their ivory spines, That they won’t melt to cryptic signs Or sink beneath a wordless stare. Yet still we build… How far can longing go? How tall can midnight shadows grow? What hands can hold a mirage still? Only the wings that skim the dune Know silence deeper than the moon, Know where the desert hides its will. How shall we love when love is vast, A tide that drowns both first and last? When sky bends low and breath takes flight, And memory folds beneath the night? In fruitful slumber we forget, That dreams are sand, That sand is wet With tides that rise, with suns that set. We are here to dance, To vanish, pretend, To solve the riddles That never end; To wander the hourglass, grain by grain, Till clouds unravel, And nothing remains.

Reflection

This poem arrived like a mirage, and I followed it. Writing it felt like tracing footprints in a desert that kept erasing itself as I walked. It was born from a longing for permanence; an urge to make sense of the shifting, the transient, the way life seems to slip like grains through an unseen glass. And yet, as I wrote, I realized I was more in love with the act of building castles than with the illusion of them standing forever.

There is a distortion in me that fears impermanence. I still catch myself trying to hold on…relationships, dreams, identities, the way a name sounds when someone calls it with love. That fear builds towers in the sand and prays to them like idols. But the wind doesn’t ask permission; it comes. And the tide erases even the footprints.

In writing Sand, that distortion softened. I began to see impermanence not as a threat, but as a choreography; a dance in which every grain has its own music. The dissolution of fear happened in stages: first in resistance (“No, not this too”), then in grief, then in wonder. I saw how the sand was not my enemy; it was simply time itself, endlessly rearranging.

This poem is my quiet apology to the desert, and my gratitude. A reminder that eternity isn’t found in what stays, but in the way we keep dancing with what doesn’t.

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