WILD HORSE LONGINGS

I am tired of wandering, barely escaping the grasp of civilization

Today I ask for an untethered home - you know the place.

An expanse of hidden wholeness where pastures meet rocky face.

Where stream trickles through boulder strewn gullies

And meadows glow their brilliance, flush with wildflowers.

Yes, I am spent. Pulled in the directions of a lifetime

My aging being longs for home.

I am ready to live as North star

where all my nurtured roots and shoots of experience

Can shine in outlandish yet simple beauty.

Let me know this home

A sacred eyrie, a thriving nest

before eternal rest.

Wind blow me home from the East.

Across the smoke-filled recesses of trodden paths, roads well-traveled.

Be the force who sets that ancient course for flying

High on the imagination of ancestors.

Those who set their vision on impossible, improbable heights.

I weep as the flute cries across this spacious, inspirited landscape.

When we are ready to sing again, lift us up,

Out of the darkness of Now, into the light of Then.

Fire and ash, you burn my throat as earth skin bakes in the sun.

Cooked by the warmth of the South, these heated days seem too much for fragile humanity.

Multitudes of us cannot even breathe at all.

And still, still the sacred fire burns. Out of our control.

Wildfire that scorches away the unnecessary, the protective borders.

My herd panics. We remain trapped in box-canyons of perceived safety. Gorges of isolation and desolation.

Enough – I cry to fire. Together we are Phoenix. So much more than flame and heat.

Pull us down, away from the glorious heights of human brain.

Come. Light the flickering fire of simple hearth,

an intimacy of community that is true home.

Let Mystery call us beyond our skins into a dreamscape waiting in Western peaks.

I have crawled long enough through thorny cactus, bristlecone, and needles of pine.

Let me feast on scratchy beards of lichen and know wisdom’s fountain hidden in this granite.

Pour us out together in deep time.

Oh, and let me never forget to blaze. A searing old-bodied one, a wild mare.

A black force of energy that rolls through the storm as thunder being.

Moving. Leaping. Dancing. Playing.

Following song lines that spin us together on unknown course.

Into a final dying – a coming home,

a returning home through wind and fire and water into the sleep of elemental bedrock.

To rest here at last.

Wildly One.

Carol Kortsch   9/20/2020