When I'm Lost

When I’m lost, I’ll pull a tome or two of poetry from the shelf and read again (for the thousandth time) the works that thrilled me in years long past. I revisit the words that once sang to me, reminding myself who I used to be, what moved me and inspired me.

When I’m lost, I listen for music that echoed in my head so many times…songs of passion, of love, of tenderness and hope that once filled my ears, my heart and soul. There’s so much more room for them now in these hollow voids of mine.

When I’m lost, I wander. My legs tell me when it’s time to go, time to venture on trails I’ve never trod to find a place that I can, perhaps, call home.

When I’m lost, I sit quietly and gaze at stars. No, I never learned to navigate by stars. I never learned to navigate. I doubt I ever will. The stars fill a deeper need. They are beacons of hope and majesty and wonder. They serve to remind me that:

“In the untamed space of Nature
The cries of a single man
Are nothing but the whisper
Of a snowflake tumbling down.”

When I’m lost, I seek my friends…my trusted creators and confidants. They can be a thousand miles away, silent. Still, they comfort me. They are omnipresent, reminding me that I will never be, truly, alone.

When I’m lost, I lie on my back through the long, dark night. My eyes are useless now, but…slowly, ever so slowly…I begin to see.

When I’m lost, I yearn to feel the winds again: “The wind at my body is wild animals licking for salt.” I yearn for thunder, lightning and rain…storms savage enough to wash the pain and shame away, cleanse me and revive me.

When I’m lost, my lips and tongue somehow/someday learn (once again) to say: “Here I am. I’m standing at the beginning. It is time to begin.”

When I’m lost, when I’m clothed in robes of brooding disposition, ruling my empty house…I wait for the quiet knock on the door. It always comes…eventually.

When I am lost, I cling to hope. As patched, ratty and leaky as that life raft has come to be, it's all I have.

* * *

in celebration of surviving
By Chuck Miller

when senselessness has pounded you around on the ropes
and you’re getting too old to hold out for the future
no work and running out of money,
and then you make a try after something that you know you
won’t get
and this long shot comes through on the stretch
in a photo finish of your heart’s trepidation
then for a while
even when the chill factor of these prairie winters puts it at
fifty below
you’re warm and have that old feeling
of being a comer, though belated
in the crazy game of life

standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong
and for a time
perhaps a very short time
one lives as though in a golden envelope of light

* * *