Winter Pilgrims - Elizabeth Herron

[Larry Robinson]


WInter Pilgrims
                 The form of a pilgrimage is makeshift.
​​​ Ronald Grimes
 
First were the boats –
rafts, dories, even an inner-tube,
in the Mediterranean. A boy
washed up face-down in Greece.
Innumerable rescues and many
too late, bodies floating
like fallen feathers. The diaspora
of the 21st Century begins to jumble --
Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Nigeria –
They come in waves over land and water.
I wanted to write about them
 
the refugees, though no one wants to call them that.
Refugees have rights. Migrants
are flightless birds, spoiled fruit, parts
of broken promises -- pressed between countries,
between civil collapse and the loss
of arable land – I saw them
 
on the  television in the Nissan Sales and Service lobby
with the sound off          
                              thousands
gathered in the winter woods
with their meager consolation of thin jackets
and small fires and thin blue tents,
 
the same blue tents we see along our freeways
where P2P-meth users huddle against the sear
of uselessness, discarded lives in blue tents
​​​​​everywhere
​​​​here
​​  and there
in the winter woods
without food, with snow the only water –
I saw them
​    on the TV
​​       with the sound off.
 
Tired of waiting
my car still not ready
I walked through November’s dusk
to the closest coffee shop – a Starbucks –
as the tipped cup of the moon came up
above the neon strip of auto row,
There she is, I thought, the silver lady
pouring her light
 
on the busy street
on the blue tents by the overpass
and on him -- the boy with the animal-ears cap
I’d seen on TV in his father’s arms
facing a wall of razor wire.
I wanted to write about them to report
from one human to another
 
about those people in the forest.
An infant who died of exposure is buried there
and a Syrian man who drowned in the border river.
There were others too.
The silver lady spilled her cup
on their graves. Days later her light
 
floods the woods, floods over the snow
stained by their pilgrimage
and over the abandoned debris, the residue
of their defeat, evidence of their presence
and their departure. Could you say
in a manner of speaking
from the heart
that now those woods are a makeshift sacred ground?
 
I wanted to write about them
our brothers and sisters seeking milk and honey
or just a job
and a plate of crappy food
and a safe place to sleep. Or just
to get out of the killing cold.
 
I wanted to write about the blue tents –
to say those people matter.
I wanted to mark the time and place --
mine walking to Starbucks
​​   ​     and theirs
on the border of Poland and Belarus
and in the no-man’s-land beside the freeway --
 
all of us
under the same silver lady.  
I wanted to say these people are strangers
only because we have yet
to recognize ourselves.

      - Elizabeth Herron 




"Be joyful though you have considered all the facts."
    - Wendell Berry