If you turn around and walk backward, you can see the colors of your footprints.
The farther back you walk, the point of departure fades into a distant blur,
while each passing moment rises like a fossil before your eyes, smiling in its wholeness.
Those who have turned around and faced the wind know
that the violence of the gusts striking the forehead
comes at last to rest upon the shoulders, leaning there in quiet repose.
To those who have walked backward, it becomes clear
that the rainwater overflowing yesterday’s footprints was a staircase of rainbows,
that the knife-sharp winter wind was the very breath from which today’s new buds emerged.
If you walk backward, you can hear
What the mugwort stalk that smiled yesterday, now turned into a mummy, is saying.
“A rainbow appears without warning.”
