The ring burns,
fire feathers
take flight
into the night.
Waves roll
in off the ocean,
reconciling madly
with the indolent shore.
Rise my fire,
fly high.
My life cycle
rise
to the stars
in the western sky.
Seek that moment
in between wood cracking
and waves lapping;
silence
is the distance between stars.
We left our artificial bonds
on the edge of the concrete steppe,
when we walked off into the land
to greet our ancestors
and our future children.
We were caked in concrete dust,
choked by funerary off-gassing.
Everything we made
had turned against us,
so we went back
to the forest that bred us.
The woods never looked at us as outsiders;
the natural world accepted us,
folding us within her branches,
accepting us,
eager even,
to make us prey,
or predators again.
Even the nights welcome us,
for the dark delights in fire.
On the pebbled beach,
driftwood fed,
our lives come down to essence.
Just us
and the sea
and the land
and the sky
and stars
that go on forever.
As the first light
peeks over the horizon
and we seek our beds,
we know;
we have come so far
from the download,
from the hash tag
and from the sorrow
of a connection
that was only
imagined.
Here,
we are together;
the safety of the tribe.
HG – 2017
