अल अबोअर्द

Follow the path to the place where you find your voice.
It’s right where the real-religious people hid it
Strangled under a fat white pillow, right where the
Teachers shredded it and threw the match
Over the whole smoking pile.
It’s somewhere in the middle of those mummified manuscripts
Thick with age and the blue crawly dust of insects.
Profane clichés and unfreudian slips
the undergarment articles of
a meaner time, after common ancestors
rough pioneer kids all
spent hard winters stitched into greasy long johns
and huddled their hoarded secret vices
under douvets sewed of ashy flannel pulled off the backs of sheep
and stuffed with straight wheat straw,
when mothers boiled soap to scrub the mouths of brats.
Still, they knew each tool each task required.
They never mistook an axiom for a saw.

Remember the German advices collected from old women:
Keep it simple. Cut the fat --but never the corners. Excise the extraneous.
Follow the steps on schedule, using the proper pattern
(counting stitches like syllables in sequences)
Eclipse the ordinary obvious, when possible,
& in boarding the train, buy a good seat to observe each inch of scenery.
Know when you are nearing your own country
By the color of the grass.
But speak up! if you hear a warning whistle
God knows, it just might be for you.

Along the way decipher shamelessly
Every bottle and bone left strewn by the seemingly random panhandler.
Search carefully for everything you lost along the way and you will find it.
Fly down the trail, breathless on your small excursions.
Observing every detail in the angle of the light.
Follow reverently the broken weeds to the place where your voice hides.
The meadow remembers no child’s temporary footprint
But the train tracks forge full circle every time
with or without their paying passengers.
And in rusted silence where the emptiness is wide,
Be comforted, the seeds left on the ground by squawking birds
making their wheeling spring migration
shall be the rising red flowers, long-necked, greedy, graceful
of a coming generation’s summer,
forever the same and new.
Listen now to the drumming message sent by your own heart.
The voice that you hear next will be your own.