Relinquishing the Clarion Call: Where I am

I’m tired now.

old enough

to hear my joints

before I hear the morning birds.

The theater of politics

has become another room

filled with men

certain of themselves,

Competing, raising their voices

as if volume and drones

could redeem their domineering history.

Many days

I’d rather slip away

from the relentless gravity.

Years ago

I stood towards the wind.

Now,

thank God,

there are younger voices,

new shoulders

willing to carry the banner;

a resurgence of dissent,

the beautiful refusal

to surrender.

Let them argue

with the emperors.

My work

is elsewhere now.

I enter the studio

where the clay releases what my mind

remembers.

The brush teaches silence.

Words become lyrical

lanterns

against the dark.

The twelve-string

opens the room

like sunlight through trees.

The six-string

holds the quieter conversations.

Even the kitchen

is a kind of prayer—

apricots,

ginger,

bread,

fire,

the alchemy

of ordinary things.

This is where

I still recognize myself.

Not in the shouting.

Not in certainty.

But in the hand

that follows

what it cannot yet name.

Here,

where imagination

is freer than power,

where I pray that, only the cosmic

authority can command

the next brushstroke,

I am,

at last.