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Walking the Dunes

By Brenda Hillman b. 1951 Brenda Hillman

In movies when the hero is about to die,

He scatters a few phrases in a place like this,

Hoping the words will come up again

Immortal, or the grasses will reach out for him

As now they do for us.

Someone has planted a row of little trees

To stop the wind. Instead they’ve learned

To bend like the elect

In one direction only; they know

The sea will shatter them.

Isn’t it always like this?

Something uncontrollable becomes the hero,

Taking off its dress, the ice plants

Sunburn from the center out

So we can see that their deaths

Of splendid rust and yellow are not ours,

We are allowed again the glare

Of the sand, the druid hills,

The grasses brushing the legs, though

Just to have felt it once would have been enough.

Brenda Hillman, “Walking the Dunes” from The White Dress. Copyright © 1985 by Brenda Hillman. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Source: Poetry (May 1977).

Biography

One of contemporary poetry’s most eclectic and formally innovative writers, Brenda Hillman is known for poems that draw on elements of found texts and document, personal meditation, observation, and literary theory. Often described as “sensuous” and “luminescent,” Hillman’s poetry investigates and pushes at the possibilities of form and voice, while remaining grounded in topics such as geology, the environment, politics, family, . . .

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