Going Home

Brown and tan and burgundy leaves
Had fallen from the upward trees.

I tread upon their veins and stems
To the clearing around the bend.

There I sat in dormant grass,
Thought on things bound to pass;

The firewood upon the hearth,
The impending death at a birth,

The love and war between mankind,
The proclamation, “This is mine.”

I rose and onward caught the trail
And seemed to enter through a veil –

Of evergreens that pine away
All the gloom of fall’s decay.

In this, I came upon my home
Never again in need to roam.

Bluff Trail

Ochs Gateway, Lookout Mountain, GA

It is early morning –
The sun is casting life
to the eastern mountainside.
I've come down a westside trail
with a hope for warmth to come.

The trail is my labrynth –
A going into with stillness,
to this overlooking center.

I will return again –
To where the woods begin or end;
depending on the traveling.
(Interstate 24, in a parallel distance,
is a reminder of my going back).

Yet, for now,
the rustle of dry, wilted leaves
are in the foreground.

I lean against an oak,
with a bowing white pine at my side,
the cool earth below me,
the shadow of the mountain I sit upon
retreating toward me in the valley below.

A passage of time –
In leaning, sitting, retreating.
they are my present reality.

Then is not all my labrynth?
My wife, my children, my place –
All going into with stillness,
to an overlooking center.
In the foreground of my mind –

I hear her laugh,
the children wrestle like two cubs,
the shadows all get smaller.