Endangered Trailblazing
by Odin Roark

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 horizons,
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.

The 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 winterous 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 any and all,
The razed aside,
Inert and live,
Banished and dead,
Leaving many to query
What lens can sharpen that which isn’t there?

Today’s existence is but yesterday’s ethereal presence,
Once preceded by integritous footholds/handholds,
The resplendent oneness of nature’s vast inner-connection,
Now all but buried beneath
A stumbling culture’s duplicitous stepping stones.

Tracks lead precariously to penthouse suites
Where an eagles nest is but a Britannica reference,
A redolent library book of often ignored history
Reminding a father’s boy
Staring through glass-layered revelation
That decisions need pondering past momentary reward,
That Nature’s swirling white layering the once wilderness of discovery
May be 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,
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 boys on father’s shoulders,
Tomorrow’s then and now…
Again.