Over this troubled land winter is settling
with it’s mystical bright star wandering
the heavens in celestial movement
designed to guide sojourners on their way.
I feel it’s tug at my own true and exalted nature,
it’s sudden pushes and swift kicks, and try,
fitfully, to align my orbit with its stellar path –

and yet….

I’ve reasons for dark fear and cold resentment
thinking of my lost country and it’s fractured souls.
I struggle to hold on to what, when I was young,
I learned in school, in church and, through the years,
tried to practice when I wrote, worked, played, and loved.

It is not simple to uncover, buried
in teachings, rules, sermons, and books,
the lessons best to keep close and careful guard.
Countless are the numbers of those who,
in times and places, walked with me on the way.
Some have stayed by me through the years
and some stayed not long enough though from each
I learned a lesson or failed to learn and left and lost.

I have often wandered from the path
that follows that rogue and roving star.
Always it has sought to seek and save me
wherever I came from or where I was going –
from Lake Huron’s shore to my home here
where I can almost hear the Columbia river roll
in riffles and rapids to the Pacific realm.

Yes. I’ve reasons for dark fear and cold resentment
thinking of my lost country and it’s fractured souls.
Yet, over the land and the souls of the land
hangs the luminous star without name or creed.
It sings in the darkness of this winter season.
I listen for it through the dark nights.
I wait for it’s song sung by the winter rains.
Follow. Follow. Follow.
This it seems to say but says no more.
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Portland, Oregon – December 16, 2020