Going down and coming back - Bill Denham

[Larry Robinson]

Going down and coming back
 
You don’t have to be Persephone 
            or even think of yourself as Persephone
            or as Dante, or Brendan Smyth, or Andres Brevik
            or countless others I could name,
            to know there are cavernous needs
            within our souls that easily lead us down,
            knowingly or unknowingly,
            down into that underworld,
            dark, treacherous paths 
            within us all.
 
And we do know, don’t we,
            how nearly impossible,
            once we find ourselves there,
            to make it back in tact?
            Nearly, I say—
            for with open eyes,
            an honest, courageous heart,
            a laser-like focus on all,
            unflagging effort
            and not a small 
            portion of luck,
            it can, sometimes,
            be done.
 
This we know and if we look, 
            we see how some among us choose to go,
            others go, it seems, without such choosing,
            as if they were forced or sent somehow,
            still others flee in fear, thinking to escape the journey altogether
            and then there are those few who seem to have no need at all to go,
            perhaps from having traveled there before—who knows?
            
I say the going down and the making it back brings
            a knowledge that cannot be erased,
            possibilities that cannot be denied,
            openings that cannot be closed,
            a growing wholeness, to be found nowhere else, that cannot be diminished—
            a richness of experience that cannot be quantified,
            offering itself as a source—over and again, over and again—
            yielding, at each return, new discoveries.
 
              - Bill Denham 
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