Ode to the Nomadic Urge - Will Stevensen

Published Monday, June 01, 2009 by Dan Gainsford | E-mail this post

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A new friend of mine sent me a link to some of his poetry.. this one is apt.
peace,
d

Ode to the Nomadic Urge - Will Stevensen

All alone, the sediment of years unsettled
Searching for something lost in the clarity—
Through endless forms and conditions
I move from state to state.

Unsettled like Jesus
With nowhere to lay my head;
The nomadic urge beckons,
Promising the transcendence known to travellers.
To wander free and aimless, a vagabond,
A new journey always awaits
With nothing to lose
And nowhere to gain.

No home, no land, no family;
Ancestral Visions fill the empty spaces.
Crossing prairies, deserts, swamplands
Forbidden lands, hidden cities, undiscovered races;
Summoned forward by the magical unknown
Like a wild insatiable beast on the prowl
The promise of intrepid freedom
Gnaws away at one’s bones.

The mundane repetition of the householder
Holds no mystery.
The creature comforts of home
Lull us to sleep like a nursery rhyme.
The possessions we acquire
Own us.

Like the awakening stick
Wielded by the Zen master
The nomadic urge strikes to the marrow
The mercenary’s cry jolts us
From the slumber of everyday life.
Distant cries from a long gone era,
Encroach on the dreams of the soul
From a time before settlement,
When maurading hordes roamed uncharted lands
Searching endlessly for the Elysian fields.

Whispers from deep in the soul
Voices from an archaic realm
Draw us inward
Backwards through this lifetime and others
To the time before the dawn of reason.

The precivilization of the psyche
An untamed morass of primal experience
Undiluted by the anaesthetizing effects of plenty.
A time when the tyranny of the present moment
Rules awareness with an intensity
Unmet in the modern adult world.
This intensity, both wondrous and terrifying,
Attracts like an invisible gravitation
A flushing spiral catching up the watchful and reckless alike
A centripetal fugue outside the measured bounds of formality,
A numinous influence calling from abroad.

Daytime worries, one after the other,
Enclose us in a prison of our own devising.
In the twilight between
The sleep of day and the sleep of night
Between:
The empty forms of thinking, and
The ethereal forms of imagination
There is an opening beyond
Where a new trail begins
Guarded by patient, fearsome dragons.
Only caravan camels and their kindred
Unburdened after their long desolate journey
Are allowed entry through this needle’s eye.

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