And… when you return home
from wherever you are coming from,
from the place you disappeared to in the night
you left on some distant shore
or at some distant door,
come having bowed and breathed
all your breath into
the questions and koans
that you finally let find you.
Come as if risen
like a spirit or lost child
from an ancient and not so ancient souterrain.
Come having met and memorized your own
strange and beautiful silhouette.
And promise when you come, you’ll bring a fire,
a fire you’ll carry deep inside your mind.
And come with the rock, wind, and rain
in your body’s sinew, bone and blood,
and with a keening in your mending broken heart.
Come with stories, songs and invitations.
Come with conversations that no one need interpret
or claim as right or wrong.
Come with horizons rugged, fierce
and rounded within you.
Come speaking in your mother’s
mother’s mother’s tongue.
And when you finally do set foot upon the soil
that is closest to the simplicity of your soul,
come with a single, solitary message
for those you love and struggle most not to love:
tell them, do not be the swan
that only sings its song while dying.
Tell them, instead, to sing their song
every morning of every day.
Tell them to sing it at every threshold
and with the courage of a country
that knows its blossoms,
the silver of its moon,
and the golden treasure of its sun,
and every bite of its bitter
and not so bitter apple.
And tell them once and for all
to let their song wander with them
like a pilgrim walking
their living, breathing prayer.
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