Duplicitous Stepping Stones

(A prosetry essay)

Astride his father’s shoulders,
Like a double-decker bus,
There was always what his father saw,
And the child’s gaze beyond.
They learned together
What their senses taught them of reality.

There were so many hills his father climbed,
The boy seeing what was ahead on the horizon.
The father focused on firm footholds
Following trusted forest imprints
Relying on tradition’s habitude.

This father is long gone now,
This boy of shoulder wonderment
Has grown wise of rugged tracks
Leading to this day.

A stormy December afternoon,
Staring through a digital lens
Atop a mid-town observation deck,
The boy now a man,
Stares outs across a skyscraper landscape,
A wintry tundra his father never had to pioneer.

Realizing the Now of navigating
Relies little on the primitive tracks,
When plant,
Animal,
Rock,
Weather,
Parts of the undeniable whole,
Determined shelter and food,
Life and death.

Wisdom,
The oft-missing essence of success,
Impacts little of today’s aspiration,
Whose awareness respects not learned footprints,
Nor hardened determination
To stay true to a right direction.

Instead…

All too often
Success honors but bushwhacked obstacles,
The opportunity to conquer the all of everything,
The razed aside,
Inert and live,
Banished and dead,
Leaving many to query
What lens can sharpen that which isn’t there?

Today exists but yesterday’s ethereal presence,
Once preceded by footholds/handholds of integrity,
The resplendent oneness of nature’s vast inner connection
Is now all but buried beneath
A stumbling culture’s duplicitous stepping stones.

Tracks lead precariously to beach houses and penthouse suites
Where an eagle’s nest is but a Google reference,
A redolent library book of often ignored history
Reminding a father’s boy
Staring through glass-layered revelation
That decisions need pondering past monetary reward,
That Nature’s swirling white layering,

The once a wilderness of discovery,
Maybe foreshadowing avalanche forces,
Unrestrained in their ability to bury man.

Pulling his eye away from the telescope,
He considers a wind gust lifting snow,

Daring not to confront the ground,
Choosing instead to swirl,
To levitate with perhaps man’s exhausted currents from below
Aura struggling to rise through waning memory,
Trajectories of so many devoted fathers,
Trusting honest trailblazing would never disappear.

Fortunately,
Like the cyclic snows from on high,
Rising temperatures initiate their own revolution,
Endings return to beginnings,
Nullifying load and weight.

Time’s undaunted sagacity knows
Once civilization’s latest aspiration expends,
Creation knows no better than to invent new trails

New steppingstones of honesty,

New boys on fathers’ shoulders,

Tomorrow’s then and now…

Again.