The Necessary Voyage

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

When the birds have come to say, “wake and rise,”

I do, gathering my life into a bundle of severances,

resting words of gratitude on the brows of the departed,

some of them in mirrors, my heart used up in this place.

Not of all voyagers get maps or a compass that points
to something other than grief. Some must go without

bearing. Actually, the honest books, sermons, and town

criers say that many and many more are going this way,

just on from somewhere destroyed, hoping with an acrid,

musty hope that there is a healing land before them.
For a man to leave what he loves, there’s a good chance

he’s already died, or begun to and surely will.

Does one remain a citizen of a fallen city?

Shall I ask this of the woodland creatures? Shall I ask it

of my name and those who carried it into the world

before me over long distances because, well, because

love departed the soul of some person and place.

At my desk near a large picture window, I write and
and wonder while listening to the song of birds

who will soon lift and go. What can I inherit of this?
What’s there to make of the necessary voyage when

the land no longer offers a tending embrace.

I don’t know how the birds do it, keeping their glee

about it year after year. We humans aren’t built

like that it seems. Life after life it goes on, the

wretched longing for birth place, for story place,

for the place that made sense of us.

We arrive wounded, betrayed by the gods, weeping,
and impatient to love and be loved again. Looking

around I realize that we are all necessary voyagers.

How do I make my peace with that fact? How

do I reconcile my ability to hang seed for the birds,

but not to provision water in a desert, or a map and

compass to the great ship captain?

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

Published in Conversations with Mary: Words of Attention and Devotion

Winner of the Nautilus Book Award silver medal for poetry

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