Wednesday, July 13, 2011

off to Wyoming!


Out of the Can


there’s a lot of the herd animal in us:
to get to Wyoming and the its wide-open spaces
we become sheep at the airport,
blindly following every whoever who tell us what to do,
adjusting each action to fit the other
so many lines and so much walking by each other
with averted eye and yet noticing all,
the social glue of cell-phones everywhere,

people have to talk, to face the other,
put most of us in wilding nature
and soon we circle and face each other,
it’s much harder to face out into all that is not us,
at least not us in the familiar sense of easy mirror,

dusk has fallen on the Tetons
and I sit outside alone but for the stars,
and even among them I see the space station brilliantly pass by,
a dim satellite heads north,

I think of Walt Whitman leaving a lecturing astronomer
to stand outside so that the stars themselves spoke without translator,

a truth I love in Quakerism is that we should get as close as we can
to the Source, for a primary source can help us close into rightness.

by Henry H. Walker
June 30, ’11

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