Reality returns

Reality returns

This war has stolen my soul, my very sense of the real and unreal, but now I feel the first faint steps of reality returning.

I sit on the garden bench
in the cool dawn and
suddenly the breeze kicks up,
comes rushing from the northwest,
and like a three-month-old puppy,
surrounds me and licks my face clean.

I wake again to see the robin glide from the phone wire
to the blue spruce, looking my way
as if he's on tour and I'm the attraction.
He leaves and a squirrel starts across the stone wall,
stopping at the tree (I've never known its name -
how could I not know it after 38 years?)
Stopping at the tree long enough
to peer in the hole in its trunk like a child,
checking too early on a Sunday morning
to see if his playmate is up and can come out.
He emerges alone and continues along the wall.

I will walk in the yard.
I will feel the earth, soft, damp
and living beneath my feet with miracles
I can only start to imagine,
headlined by the green sprouts of spring bulbs
emerging from a winter's rest,
undaunted by days of ice and snow.

Ice and snow - there is one dying patch,
a grey shadow, really, thin and worn,
in the backyard that the sun
has not yet reformed.

And I will start to know once again
that I am part of it all.
That the machines,
the drama, the excitement, terror
of this war in Iraq
cannot separate me from the reality,
the once and future, ever present
I long to know. I did know. I will know.
War's hold - the breath of evil -
can soil my soul for moments, days, and weeks -
but I return . . . I return.

The paper stays in the box by the road,
shouting for me to join its world,
and I turn a deaf ear to it.
Bren will be up shortly. We will walk the beach,
we will eat a quiet breakfast,
we will go to Meeting.

Escape the war? Never.
But there is so much more,
and to this, all this, I return.

Posted by Greg Stone at March 23, 2003 06:26 AM