The Meditation Of Travel
To warm ourselves before a stove
in a foreign province,
to rise early,
the wayfarer’s prayer
on our tongues,
to watch fish blaze through shallow streams
and think of home,
to shift our load from one shoulder to the next
and be reminded of the faces
of lovers that failed us
ages ago.
All these form the meditation of travel,
all these are not unlike carrying a cello
through a winter night,
the dark wood rotting
in the snow.
Yehoshua November’s work has appeared in The Sun, Provincetown Arts, Margie, and Prairie Schooner, and was selected as a finalist for the 2009 Autumn House Poetry Prize.
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