Coming Home

By Jean Nielson Bayles

Published in San Juan Centennial Sampler 1980

What is this, but rocks and earth and air?
This place where wind drinks dry the ground,
Where sand will swirl and settle and wait--
Silent--to be stirred up again?

Here sun beats down on rocks and sand
Too hot to touch or rough to rest;
Where feet are bare, and then --there is the quiet.
It shutters every door and window of this place.

How sweet the seldom green and cooling shade
That must be searched for here.
What is it then--but rocks and earth and air?
What?  This--a silent voice will tell.

"Tis bed and hearth and home for some
Whose time preceded mine,
Whose unknown faces fill my dreams,
Whose hands I see, have shaped my past.

It is the rocks which mark in grooves
The memory of wagon after wagon
Laden with life's substance.
For only heavy burdens etched their way.

Rocks, where hide the secret, shadowed caves
Where many came to rest, weary;
Or to dance with the dancing bonfires flames;
Or only to find, in solitude, the strength
to descent to the sand again.

This place is air--the early
Morning river scent from that
Temperamental river which
They fought--and which they loved.

And evening smells of dusk and tiny
Purple blossoms--south in cracks and corners
Of the cliffs-a precious, simple
Beauty they found to fill their homes.

And here is earth.  They walked its lonely paths
They plowed its empty fields,
Up from it they built their homes, their town
To mark their presence in this place.

They brushed its endless dust
From off their chairs and pantry shelf
They swept it hard and smooth outside their door--
To make it clean, this earth.

And here they came to lay at last
Among the rocks and earth and air.

What is this place?  It is the whispers
of their words, the echoes of their footsteps.
And listening, listening, I can hear my name.
The voice of what I was and why I am.

This is coming home.