Sandrise

I left the hut when all the stars

had left the sky

but day was yet to come.

I walked a virgin sea of sand

where lizard tracks

in drunken routeways ran.

A silent expectation toned the air.

Then she came –

a pinprick, red between two distant peaks,

then a brimming dewdrop;

brilliant condensate of orange light

inflating with a sigh of heat.

Quivering she grew;

till bigger than the distant hills

which framed her birth.

Silently untethered from the gravity of earth she rose

in bouyancies of brightness

to the surface of the sky.

Then the monochrome light of morning melts away;

colours run across the world until the sand

is a sea of yellows and gold

and the sky is an ocean of blues.

Shadows arrive, seeping up through the sand

and with deft liquid touch

etch black inks on the land.

There among curved shadows of the dunes

and corrugated shadows of the sand,

the shadow of a person stands

and mimics every move I make.

This genie of the sands may mock my moves

and yet his gnomon shadow

points unerringly to home.