Wayfaring

Here's another older poem about nomadics, from 1986, slightly revised; again, maybe not the best poem I've ever written, but since I'm traveling right now, I'm in the mood to review some of my older writings about nomadics, travel, and pilgrimage.



Earlier this week, I visited Robinson Jeffers home in Carmel, CA, Tor House and Hawk Tower. They only do tours on weekends, and I was there on a Thursday; nonetheless, the quiet and beauty of the place, under its canopy of tall trees, with its view of the ocean at its feet, and the quiet, inhabited beauty of the buildings themselves, was enriching. I just stood there for awhile, taking in the silence and the beauty of the place, and I felt reverence enter my heart. A place of enchantment.

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wayfaring

you start from a place
you never left behind,
crossing endless paths, never staying,
though you have smelled meadow wildflowers
and once, at a summerland place, you rested;
but never long. the road always calls
you into being in motion;
you walk into twilight.
you have slept in fields
beneath terrifying stars,
in barns, in houses, in caves, in snow,
in leaves, in beds, in ruins;
you never cared enough for shelter.

now you have no voice,
no reason to speak as you walk.
nighthawks circle in the twilight;
their calls are music enough, their speech
is full of your own words,
the same speaking, same tongues;
now you become elemental,
outside the unknown,
last time you tried to speak
it came out a waterfall,
a desert sandwind.