By: Hunter Christian
Walk the road before you
Bask before your shadow
Stretched onto Carolina asphalt
Toward the horizon fate beckons
*
Going, going, gone – the boy morphed into a man awash in the
lightscape of the wayward dawn
*
Take pride in your masculine gait
In the stride each step taken sends,
your body into the future with certitude
Westward bound your calling rings louder
*
Further, farther, farthest – where manhood longed for boyhood
whistled in a yesteryear song
*
Rest well within God\'s heath and heather
If the inkwell swallows the pen and feather too,
scribe upon the ledger of your mind\'s eye
Revel in nature\'s bedchamber beneath a twilit Sugar Maple canopy
*
Sleep, sleepier, slept – lie on fallow ground where native born folk
once longingly wept
*
Find sanctuary amongst prickly sweetbriar that nestle wild rose
Steer clear of sapling whose branches slice the sweet southern
air hard like malice aforethought
The very whipping rod that you lost into the wake,
of a speedboat\'s tempest as present faded to past amidst the
scent of jasmine and white magnolias.
*
Smile at the passersby who race to the holiday crab shack across
the lake\'s clear water to catch dinner
For grandfather taught you to catch a fish with pride from the
patchwork dock from where you stand
And, grandfather was a fisherman
Now, you are a fisherman too.