Walking Home

There is something about reading poems that are almost nostalgic when read. They seem to hit harder to me, especially when I can create a personal connection. Walking Home from Oak-Head gives me that feeling. It is much like a poem that I would write or I feel that I would write.

“There’s something
about the snow-laden sky
in winter
in the late afternoon

that brings to the heart elation
and the lovely meaninglessness of time.”

Those last two lines are what got me at first. At first I am given a vision or view of a late winter afternoon. Then I am brought deeper inside myself to explore the possibilities of how I feel as I walk through such a thing as familiar as a winter afternoon. When we go through life, sometimes we take such things for granted. When I go to my parent’s cabin in North Carolina and view out at the mountains in the distanced I often have this feeling. Eventually I will go home and back to the usual busying about of life, the ceaseless scurrying to get homework done and make ends meet. However, in that place I forget why time had a purpose. Instead I am lost in that moment staring at a part of God’s creation oblivious to what other duties await me outside of that place.

This poem gets at me in this way. It is because I stand sometimes during storms, sunsets, sunrises, or any thing that makes me pause and take notice and I lose track of life. I have come to realize that the poems that I like are ones that I can personally relate to, whether in style of writing or in the message. Of course, if I cannot understand it then I cannot see the relation, even if it nails my personality perfectly.