By Charles M. Sumid     Copyright 2025     Written 1974

No artist’s hand has sculpted these faultless curves.
No mathematician calculated these exact angles.

Just wind and grain, grain and wind,
playing their ageless exchange
of lift and fall, of catch and release.

Each sand crystal—
too small to see alone—
skitters along until it finds its resting place.

The dune builds windward side grain by grain,
steep slope rising until it can rise no more.

Then, the cascade—
sand flowing down like water,
advancing the dune inch by year
across the desert floor.

Morning light catches ripples,
those smaller ridges that crosshatch the slopes.
Physicists name them one thing.
Desert travelers call them the writing of God.

They form at night while we sleep,
or in minutes during sandstorms
when no eyes can bear witness.

No training needed.
No practice.
No refinement.
No thought.

Only small things in motion,
their endless willing surrender to force.

Look at this dune field—
these waves frozen in mid-break,
these symmetries that never measure themselves,
these curves that never ask if they please the eye.

A dune remains unaware of its shape.
Its crest line traces no message it can read.
The slip face keeps no record of yesterday’s form.

Yet watching long enough would show them breathing—
rising, falling, shifting, flowing,
the entire desert in slow-motion tide.

Touch any grain.
Once it was mountain.
Once it was rock.
Now it’s particle, one among billions,
shaped by water, by wind,
by collision with others.

Nothing squandered in this economy.
No overarching plan.
No striving for effect.

Just each grain finding its way
to where it fits.

Scientists say sand dunes sing—
varied tones as grains tumble down their slopes,
or whisper across the surface.
Some pitches too low for human ears,
others bright as birdsong.

These shapes echo everywhere—
ripples mirror dunes,
dunes mirror mountain ranges,
ranges mirror planet contours.

The wind calligraphies its treatise on form.
The sand takes dictation.
Neither can read what they’ve written.

How might we move if we moved like sand—
asking nothing, resisting nothing,
finding form through yielding?

Tomorrow’s wind will rescript everything.
Tonight’s stars will shine
on configurations no human eyes will see.

The dunes never notice the loss,
never mourn their erased geometries.

They only yield, grain by grain,
to what moves them.