Call Yourself Home

I make no promises, but if you wake to walk

and take your walking slow, that limbed

and branched falling your body knows,

and if you follow your feet until slow is who you are,

then maybe, each thrilling drop of dew on a leaf

of grass suspended, will sing the morning

for you, and when a sudden flight of rainbow

lorikeets shout very fast is very slow, you might

go so far—though the miles you travel do not

matter—as to leave your whirring mind

to idle, and like the heath on a slope that steps

down to the sea, where every bush bends with

the sculpting hand of the wind, recognise

the bones of your being; how blue sky is bound.

Note: the opening lines of this poem reference Theodor Roethke’s “The Waking”, that begins “I wake to sleep, and take my/ waking slow.”