Vast fields of ice

Pure white, blinding

Endurance wedged,

Groans as she’s crushed

The miraculous trek begins.

Through war-ravaged shambles

Across homeless encampments and

Hospital wards where respirators

Gasp and saline drips; 

Past ice-cliffs of struggle,

Through foreboding canyons of grief

Among the starving children and 

Newly baptized saints in the cages that

Overlook the cemetery where infants join

Old men and widows, and where reckless

Teenagers sleep and young widowers wail as they

Stumble for words of explanation for sobbing children.

Trudging on over blazing deserts 

Snake mounds and petroglyphs

Where cactus wrens and roadrunners worship

Under the watchful gaze of the ram

Perched confidently on enigmatic assurance.

Sailing now on lashed barges with

Cotton sails, through inky seas of chaos,

Racism and fascist hatred; seas filled with 

Macropredators slicing waves that 

Can swallow the most massive ship.

Onward through sorrow, pain, grief, and loss,

Indominable women, scarves pulled

Tightly about their heads, sheltering 

Babes in ragged coats in groups of four

Or, are there five?

“I know that during that long and racking march, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.” – Sir Ernest Shackleton, South

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you.”

–  T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32)