Homewards

I have feared that gone are the days of magic and mayhem,

those hot summer eves when hordes of kids in the street  

squealed after supper, played hide and seek and kick the can

as the orange sun sunk under the West Hills, and those July

afternoons hitting the long ball rounding the bases

heading for home.

Then come with me now, if you will, to a cave door

bouldered shut at top of a field in midnight’s hushed

hour, entering cool earth with purpose, inching downwards

we’ll move into the presence of past where much may be found.

As we step into a moist grotto, grip this pick-axe

left here by Rumi the poet, grab its ash handle, feel the heft

of the tool and your sure strength as well.

Swinging it boldly groundwards, you pierce the dirt floor

where pottery shards and tourmaline nuggets gleam

in darkness like boyhood’s baseballs hidden

in Mrs Tupling’s sacred rose bushes, that off limits

garden where only your eagle-eyed mother

could find the lost leather orbs.

I towel sweat from your brow as deeper you dig.

We gaze up through black air at intricate patterns

of boxwork embossed over centuries, minerals drip

from above to lace the cave’s high ceiling

as each drop of water builds a home bit by bit,

a crossword puzzle completed by perseverance

and grit over time, like a family becoming

its best and real self by naming and honoring

every one of its ancestors.

Breathe in this still feeling, the quiet structuring

of earth’s fluids, listen closely, give complete attention

as Chippewa Indian spirits whisper their lives here underground.

Birchbark canoes glide across infinite lakes where wild rice,

walleye and northern pike lived freely together in four seasons,

until the white man’s coming, the violent sinful intrusions, theft

of their homes, rape of their women, children ripped

from the green northern forest to schools of strange religion,

brainwashed and flogged in God's name for singing their own songs.

Now you must reclaim and carry their history with yours’

along with their grace and brave wholehearted embrace

of life while the pickaxe reveals their wisdom and pain, 
their powerful knowing earth-sky’s continual flowing, 
these true connections between the shine, the flowering 
of present, future and past.

With unburied stories of long time and Great Spirit in our bones

and our hearts, we’re ready to move upwards, slowly re-enter

the world of daylight, crawling then walking in reverent footsteps of silence.

Blinking our eyes as we bathe again in gold sun, we return

to the street in front of our house, now back on the playfield

near the comfort of front porches, summer suppers, baseball bats

instead of pickaxes, hopes of home runs and boyhood worries

about a prickly neighbor’s forbidden rose bushes.

Wistfully we smile with vague memories of beautiful ancestors

and strange patterns of minerals, faint echoes of sore hands

and stiff shoulders, yet rest in deep satisfaction of such gifts

received from not to be forgotten work underground

On the street where we live we hear our chums' bursting laughter,

the sharp cracking of bats as horsehide baseballs gallop far

and soar through the air, sometimes plunging into perfumed

thorns of pink flowers to disappear in an instant then reappear

when uncovered by a perceptive mother. These days now

are like shooting stars from time’s great distances

where our hallowed forefathers and mothers forever brighten

our lives, thankfully completing the circle by bringing magic, mayhem

and mystery to us through their sure-footed knowledge of the four directions

and all seasons, their centuries of courage gifting us with open-hearted love.