• Getting to the basics.
• Being what I am
• Simplifying the Journey doesn’t make it easier.

Before Winter

By Eugene Marckx

Just to go there and breathe that air
and see that river silver through the valley
until I’m within reach of that peace again
with those people along those roads

Just to help cut hay into long windrows
and smell it curing under a harvest moon
then to bale and stack it into their barns

Just to chop and stack firewood for them
and feed their horses fallen apples

Then to wake up hearing acorn woodpeckers
chisel small holes in a tall dead tree
to fit fresh acorns tight into the wood
before winter

Just to hold my breath a little longer
to hear where we quit hearing each other

Then to go back and change some things I said
the way those woodpeckers would carve
new smaller holes for shrunken acorns
fallen away

Or to tell myself now what I need to know
in short whispers here against the cold
that none of us knew then on the changing wind