Terra Salis
Wind stalls and I revel in a whiff of lake stink,
Letting the breeze shred my senses
Until even the sun is a saline lens-
I can’t pretend
Antelope Island hasn’t stung me to the quick.
Maybe it’s the sheer concentration of sodium chloride
Lacing the sand with shattered star patterns
That scratches through my jaded skin.
The Great Salt Lake could glut the world
With 1.5 grams of NaCL for a hundred years,
But only the isle gemmed in the remnant waters
Of an ice age sates my ahungered soul.
I’ve tramped Antelope Island just three times,
Yet with each wandering, I slip deeper
Into Precambrian wilds where waves whip
Mounds of cloudy crystals onto banks,
Glossing Terra Firma into Terra Salis.
Life treads out my keenest hopes,
Mocking me with Matthew’s admonition:
“Ye are the salt of the earth:
But if the salt have lost his savour,
Wherewith shall it be salted.
It is thenceforth good for nothing,
And to be trodden under foot of man.”
Yet here, the earth’s salt flies back to me
The “white gold” of dreams gleaming wild:
What I have forgotten,
What I may become,
I can savor,
Still.
;
Sarah Page graduated from Southern Connecticut State University with an M.S. and certification in Secondary English in 2013. She is a 2013 recipient of Dialogue’s New Voices award for poetry. Her poems have been published in journals including Connecticut River Review, Fresh Ink, Star*Line, Otto, Apeiron Review, Mormon Artist, NonBinary Review, Noctua Review, Glint Literary Journal and included in the anthology Fire in the Pasture. She is the Co-Editor of Young Ravens Literary Review.