What You Gave Me

In the late afternoon sky

the curved smile of the all-alone moon

hangs with clouds in the salt marsh.

Here at Bos'in Point, you find this arrowhead

in rutted sand and pass it from your hand to mine—

What mysteries come with this?

Under what moon was it shaped?

And from whose hand has it passed?

The moon is as silent as the spirit,

a shaman who led you to this

thick-with-thumbprints obsidian blade

ancient as tide itself.

You have found it and given it life—

it lies in the palm of my hand,

passed from some primeval creator

through history to me, to us—

its point and serrated edges

an unimagined and elegant piercing,

sacred and long ago as the moon.