SALT

If you want to analyze its essence, function,
its use in this world,
you can't isolate it:
it must be seen in context.

Salt
is not the parts that make it up,
but the unified tribe. Without that
each particle would be a fragment of nothingness,
its action drained into a remote black hole.

Salt springs from the sea.
It is sea foam
petrified.
It is ocean
dried up by the sun
and so, finally exhausted,
stripped at last of its great water strength,
it flings itself on the beach and turns to stone on the sand.

Salt is the desert where once was sea.
Water and earth
reconciled,
matter belonging to no one:
through it the world knows the taste of living.