Ill-equipped for the journey

You know I love you, but I’m lost.

My compass is cracked.
My maps are smudged and old,
And I couldn’t find the right
Survival gear for the wet and cold.

I can’t quite trust the compass:
Its memory of poles locked within.
I mean, it works and all--
But I forget which hemisphere I’m in.

The maps are so old
That Indonesia reads “Batavia”,
And some ‘Soviet Union’ still
Spreads blood-red across Asia.

And I searched every website
To find just the ‘right stuff’,
But it’s made in those places
We warred with.
                             I thought: “enough”.

But the windcheater doesn’t,
And the cargos split at the seams,
And the shoes, the shoes
Are like wearing little trampolines.

You know I’m lost, but I love you;
I’ll be there as soon as I can.
Though my lens is a cleft world view,
I’ll be there as soon as I can.

Less than two weeks left at theological college. Shipping boxes packed, I'm down to a suitcase and a briefcase and a travel guitar, and a strange, dissociated feeling.

As I prepare to close one chapter and open another, I find myself in that liminal space, the edgelands between actual places, where one is neither here, nor entirely there.

It's difficult to get your bearings in a long twilight, and difficult to gauge direction when you, for a time, belong nowhere in particular.

In transit: a 'world without end', without borders, sans frontieres.

For me, this will end. But God help those for whom such days are all their days: refugees, asylum-seekers, the perpetually displaced. They're everywhere, but hidden away from the sort of people who will read this.

I dedicate this, as a prayer, for them.

A pertinent Woody Guthrie song: