You have held me and my story since I was a young girl
wishing for someone, anyone, to see me. A girl who did not see herself Or her story in the community that was supposed to be her home.

I come to your shores and I see an entity, forgotten, neglected cast aside to the west, Whose name was spoken with disdain and revolt, an outcast, a wasteland. I run to your shores and I see myself echoed in your landscape salt-encrusted sands preserving feathers, wood, and bone

a stillness so loud I can hear the heartbeat of the earth for the first time I can hear the etchings on the inside of my heart

I see in you a kindred spirit, a mirror of my story, an echo of my soul, and I tell you my secrets. I sit at countless points of your shores,
horizons, rocky points, wading into your waves and lying on your soft grass beds, pouring my heart into you, crying to you,
sharing my dreams with you, performing ritual and ceremony with you.
And you are always there, your presence constant
and full of the purest unconditional love. You are the mother, the refuge, the catalyst of all the parts of me
I don’t know how to let the rest of the world see.

I stand now at your receding curves and I cry with you
I celebrate and rejoice in the ways you have shapeshifted as an entity of love, healing, and presence.

You are the mirror image of an island on top of the world
Black sand and greens compared to your grays and yarrows
where I found myself and hundreds of swans
ivory dancers scattered across green and black lava fields
singing up to the dancing lights in the night sky, flying across glaciers and sleeping mountains.
a ring of time connecting this past life to this present moment,

I spent years looking for swans on your shores and I finally found them
driving on the causeway, waiting for me. They stood cooing in your shallow waters stretching their curved necks and looking back at me with their ebony eyes waiting for me to join them before spreading their wings and taking flight

their webbed feet curled tightly against their chests as they fly into the northwest Flying between cloud and ice, flying back in time to where
I stood years ago on top of a mountain, wishing I could scream

I stand at your shores now and I take in a breath and scream for the first time
and I call myself home to the sacred space between earth and sky, light and shadow,

bone and flesh, feather and down, ash and flame.
In the in-between of memory and dreams existing outside of time

You are the home I always wanted and the container of my power
I am home in your arms and your story and mine are one as we sing into the rising sun
together.

Sarah May (she/hers) is a Salvadoreña artist, weaver, poet, and bruja who has long called the Lake home. As someone who lives in the in-between of multiple worlds and identities, Great Salt Lake is a sacred place where she is seen and held in all she is and where she cultivated her magic into the artist and storyteller she is today.