The Scout at Gratitude

Some of these recent poems are relatively new and no doubt will change in the coming days, months, years. Some I've been posting I have worked on for years already. I can't say why, but recently they have begun to feel finished. This is one I wrote the first draft of at least 8 years ago. I have thought it was done a half-dozen times, I'm sure. Maybe now it is. (Maybe not.) It looks long, may well seem long, but is only 550 or so words. It is about a wagon train of emigrants making its way west and they have had a traumatic event among themselves somewhere along the way and are wounded.

We are all on one journey; we are all emigrants from the womb.

The Scout at Gratitude

As at the beginning,

as it is in the Book,

after confrontation and disillusion

came dissolution, an exiling,

and deaths we did not discuss.

Thus, one by one, a vestige,

we came to a circular meadow and we named it Gratitude.

We pulled our wagons in to the meadow’s middle

and set up camp and built fires from wood

we'd gathered under trees on the outskirts.

In the fires we roasted our baskets of wild onions.

We roasted deer meat and squirrel and turkey.

Over their smoldering bones we boiled the last of our coffee.

It felt better to be out from the trees and under the wide sky.

At noon Scout carried
a call to gather at sundown.

"No guns but eyes

and arms and souls" he said.

It was near dark

when a youngster spied

a great gray owl in a cedar pine.

Warily it watched

several who approached

then winged out over Gratitude

and back above the bare trees east,

as we gathered in the meadow

where Scout said "we are weary.

We are hungry. But no longer

can we be like the wary owl winging east

into the darkness past. We have left the womb,

are emigrants from the womb expelled

to face together the same dark, same frost, same fire.

Now we have left the dark behind. And we have burned.

And we have walked through the dark and frost and

we have burned. And those we sent away

and those we killed were the hard frost

that must burn away and be forgotten,

the bark the burnt tree must shed."

Still our hearts and our voices tarried.

After a night's sleep

an early waking child squealed

at the fattened owl's return.

And as the sky brightened we gathered

again in a circle at the center of Gratitude

where each peered coldly at each

until Scout proclaimed the truth:

after the expelling wounds in-fliction

our legs and hearts were shattered,

we were no longer one but many and strange

and if ever to arrive at our destiny

we must not fear to be one kind again.

Come closer, he said, shrink the circle,

and thus slowly did Cook approach Smith

as the sun rose higher and an early spring frost

gently disappeared and as each peered at each

our so did our strangeness surrender and slowly

our kind-ness return, give us comfort,

show each as a mirror to each,

so that Cook appeared to Smith as Smith,

and Smith to Cook became as Cook himself.

And after having so painfully walked for weeks

in lonesome isolation we were re-deemed:

Children cried, women sang, men laughed and howled.

We fired our rifles for the first time since.

Scout cried out that after the expelling

wound’s in-fliction this bitter detour

was our saving, that now we had redeemed

ourselves as ourselves with new love and bright joy.

Another day's rest for the oxen and

we pierced the edge of Gratitude

where the river had dwindled to a trickle.

Cook punctured a tin of blueberries from St. Joe

and walked against the train’s flow

giving something sweet to the young.

We saddled and yoked penetrated deeper the thickets west,

found new meadows as the light

and the young grew. Each morning
we looked for the frost that will burn

without leaving a residue.

We knew now that to linger in that just one white morning
would return to us every kindness and hope.

                                               -J. O'Brien