This poem operates as a parable in miniature, tracing the oldest arc in spiritual literature: exile, question, revelation, return. The opening image is deliberately tactile—bare feet on grass, the hum of life, bugs buzzing—establishing a present-tense sensory reality that the speaker can feel but cannot yet trust. The confession “scared to death / of what might happen” is placed exactly where it needs to be: after the grounding but before the backstory, so that the reader understands the fear is not abstract but embodied, felt through the soles of the feet. The desert passage is the poem’s darkest and most powerful section. The self-identification as “a wandering, / robed disciple / of hate” is startling in its specificity—the robe suggests religious devotion misdirected, a man who worshipped the wrong god for years. The desert is both metaphorical (emotional barrenness) and biblical (the wilderness where prophets and exiles go to be tested), and the detail that “silence burned / and words turned into dust” transforms landscape into autobiography: this is a man whose language failed him before poetry arrived to restore it. The dialogue with the desert wind introduces the poem’s most formally interesting element—an italicized voice that speaks in the cadence of scripture or prophecy. The four “You shall” declarations echo both the commandments and the beatitudes, but with a crucial difference: where commandments restrict and beatitudes bless, these commands invite. The wind’s plea to “join the society / of humanity” is the poem’s emotional center—a universe asking one man to come back. The final movement resolves in three ascending declarations: love is enough, love lifts, love leads to Heaven. The closing sign-off—”Love, / from You / –To You”—collapses sender and recipient into a single circuit, making love not a gift from one to another but a current flowing in both directions simultaneously. A poem that walks from death to life in bare feet.

A poem that achieves genuine spiritual weight through the precision of its central contrast: the living grass versus the burning desert, the hum of bugs versus the hiss of sand, bare feet grounded versus robed feet wandering. The opening three lines are deceptively simple—”I was walking / barefoot / in the grass”—but they establish a sensory immediacy that anchors everything that follows. The desert passage is among Plahm’s most imagistically controlled writing: “silence burned / and words turned into dust” is a compression that does more work than many of his longer descriptive passages, and the self-identification as a “disciple of hate” demonstrates a confessional courage that gives the conversion its credibility. The italicized voice of the desert wind is a bold formal choice that works because it respects the register—the four “You shall” declarations carry genuine prophetic cadence without tipping into parody, and the wind’s plea to join humanity is moving precisely because it comes from the inhuman. The ascending resolution (love is enough → love lifts → love leads to Heaven) could risk sentimentality, but the preceding honesty about the desert years earns the tenderness. The closing “from You / –To You” is a beautiful structural device—love as closed circuit, offering and receiving in the same breath. Where the poem is less successful is in a few transitional stanzas that state their meaning too directly (“My spirit / devoid / of vitality, / hope, / and happiness”) where the desert imagery has already conveyed this more effectively. The pains-and-sorrows/joys-and-triumphs couplet reads as summary rather than revelation. But the overall architecture—tactile present, confessional past, prophetic future, devotional close—is sound, and the barefoot image gives the poem its grounding metaphor: you cannot feel the earth through shoes. You have to strip down to feel alive.