Touch Ground
Driving five hundred miles will
give you some perspective.
We must all go a great distance
to retrain our focus and break free
from the all too familiar.
But I kept on paddling
because I was afraid to sink.
Now my compulsion to move
does battle with the stillness
my soul has prescribed.
Could this be the middle passage?
I’m living the tension between
the old and the new.
My feet and back say no more,
my heart says keep going.
Like when I was a child,
the trees are speaking to me.
We know, they say,
we’ve been here all along.
It’s so easy to go away,
but when you become lost,
touch ground to find your way home.
“There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.”
This is one of Brian’s new poems, written on March 21, 2023.
