Fragments of God

My grandma used to search for
fragments of God on the riverbanks,
wading through shallow waters with
tadpoles swimming around her ankles.

She was a quiet woman,
lived the way of nature, the way
of listening and finding poetry
in magnificent piles of sand
in the decay of fallen trees,
the glistening of lily pads.

Once, she showed me her collection
of what she called, “God’s tears.”
A palmful of tiny rocks picked off the river floor,
rocks, not minerals, not gems,
rocks, gypsum, pyrite, shale, and
other jagged, moss-covered, unidentified stones,
all glittering in the afternoon sun.

Now, grandma is seventy-eight,
walks with a cane,
lives alone,
and can’t remember my name.
And that’s funny because she remembers her rocks.

Each time I visit, I’d take a bamboo box out
from my grandma’s closet,
and show her the gypsum, pyrite, shale
and she’ll pick them up with trembling hands
as if she were holding the greatest
treasures on Earth
and maybe they are. Maybe
what makes a treasure a treasure
Isn’t what it can offer to us humans
but what if offers the world.
Because we are only fragments who aren’t qualified
To judge other fragments of their beauty.
the way those rocks tumbled down from the mountainside,
the way they were once boulders, and will,
in the future, be little grains of fine sand.
That’s their beauty.

Now, as I wrote this poem,
somewhere on the other side of the world,
a piece of sandstone breaks away from the cliff
and falls into the sea,
a stray cat finds a companion
an ant finds a fallen cracker on the cement.

Grandma’s rocks wait
for the day they’re thrown back into the river
where they’ll be fragments no more.

And somewhere within me,
there’s a memory, a poem,
yearning to be shared,
to be made whole.