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.
