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 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 designed to drip from above

and lace the cave’s high ceiling as each drop of fluid

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 bloodstream, listen closely, offer your attention

as Chippewa Indian spirits whisper their lives underground.

Their birchbark canoes glide across infinite lakes where wild rice,

walleye and northern pike lived freely together in four seasons.

They gather in homes warmed by bright fires until the white man’s

ominous coming, the violent intrusions, theft of their homes, rape

of their women, children ripped sinfully from green northern forests

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 wholehearted embrace of living

while the pickaxe reveals their wisdom, bravery and pain,

their powerful knowing earth-sky’s continual flowing,

these true connections between the deer, the fish and the people,

the shine and flowering of present, future and past.

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

and our hearts, we’re now 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

replacing pickaxes, with hope of ecstatic home runs mixed

with worry about a prickly neighbor’s forbidden rose bushes.

Wistfully we smile with vague memories of beautiful ancestors

and strange patterns of minerals in squares, faint echoes of sore hands

and stiff shoulders, yet we rest in satisfaction for such gifts

received from the sacred work underground.

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

the sharp cracking of bats as horsehide baseballs gallop far,

soaring through air, sometimes plunging into thorns

of pink flowers to disappear in an instant, then reappear

when uncovered by a perceptive mother.

These days dazzle like shooting stars blazing and bursting

from time’s horizon where our hallowed forefathers and mothers

illumine our lives completing the circle, thankfully returning us home 
with magic, mayhem and mystery through sure-footed knowledge 

of the four directions immersed in all seasons, their centuries

of courage walking with and for us, gifting us, warming us homewards

now and forever, with this amazing, ancient open-hearted love.