Other Airs

By Peter Halstead

I feel the touch of other airs,
the circle of the heavens, breathing,
bearing me across its chasms, leaving
land for seething skies,
my goal a speck of sand
far out in the island sea
of the universe’s solar flares,
the distant star of all our human cares,
those embers of the evening fire,
oceans rising in my eyes
where the tinder of the world is fanned.