Poem #7 for National Poetry Month. I wrote this after watching the film The Way Back.

Way Back Home

Wandering to an unknown destination doesn’t scare me

I used to love to get lost

Lost in the pages of a story in the early summer air

Only coming up for air when hungry

Even then, wanting to devour the current obsession

A musty, dusty volume selected carefully from the hot dim lit library

A morsel that had sat there waiting to be someone’s next meal

Thinned by time until the hungry patron sat down to the banquet

Celebrating its richness and feeling full with each turn of phrase

But desiring to indulge more with each chapter

with insationable hunger driving me on

Or losing myself in a song of birds down by the railroad tracks

Humid and tired picking luscious juicy wild black berries

Nothing tastes better and brings flocks to flutter over me

singing a song so beautiful as a secret plea to pick an offering for them and their music

Or lost with the man I love and loved so well in our early fun days,

of finding everything about each other so fascinating that the end of the journey wasn’t the point

The stories flowing and so many questions quilted into our frame of freedom to explore

And know and hold each other tight against the night and clap for nothing but being together under the stars there we looked up, up, up to get lost once more in silence

Now the wandering is dry and desert like where the waves of emotion are tense as the waves of heat rising before me and I see a long way,

but really can make out nothing that I recognize

Gone are those blissful hours of books and berries

But the birds still sing

And the stars there too

And you, the man I love brings me home

Where I wander no more

Except to remember what it was to be lost