Playing Fair and Being Kind

Yesterday I completed co-facilitating an Alternatives to Violence, AVP, workshop in Maine State Prison. It was a Basic workshop using two brand new inside facilitator apprentices. You can go to http://www.avpusa.org to get an idea of how this process works. Worth a look-see. After the workshop I come home and undress, put on pajama bottoms and a t-shirt and loll about with a beverage of my choosing to unwind and begin a two day rest period. I also think about footprints. Don’t ask me why. Analyze on your own time please. It’s probably because that is what workshops become metaphorically. Facilitators leave footprints in the lives of those who are participants in the workshop and then they, in turn, do the same afterward. It’s a chain of actions and reactions and further reactions, etc.
After the second beverage I am cruising along on auto, self-steering, cruise-control, iron Mike. You get my drift. So I made an effort to store away a few thoughts on footprints and here is the result. Peace out.

FOOTPRINTS

An Ocean-full

 

Running on a beach as a kid,

Leaving my mark in the sand,

Back and forth, forward and back,

Crossing and cutting leaving my mark.

 

Where did they go, my footprints?

My hand prints…my ass prints?

All that energy expended in a signature,

Savin Hill beach and Carson beach, et al.

 

One I left in the water with blood

From a glass bottle, broken and waiting

For me, stuck me, pained me,

Sent me to City Hospital in a police cruiser.

 

I feel it now like it was 70 years ago,

The instant of the stab up through my foot,

The tiny “ow” from my lips, I was taught to be quiet,

I hobbled to the medical office of the bath house.

 

All those actions of moving parts pressed into

The stationary parts,

Push the grains, compress the bits, leave a

Mark for eternity

 

Or until the next wave slices up the sand

And obliterates the message of me,

I was here until just then before the water

Was here next and it won.

 

Follow a set of footprints into a cave of sandstone,

On a stretch of Solana Beach,

Hug and kiss that little sand-witch,

Fall in love and get killed because that’s how it works.

 

Knowing that love lasts a little longer than

Footprints but not much,

All those footprints, human, animal,

Float away down the slope with the slicing waves.

 

Fill the ocean with happenings that happened,

Lasted for about as long as a love affair,

Not as long as the taste of lips on lips,

The ocean fills with brief ecstasy.

 

The ocean is the great depository for memories,

Written with heels and toes and insteps,

Forever in our minds you’d think,

I can hear them, in the ocean, running, laughing, weeping.

G. M. Goodwin
2 July 2018