A Way in the Wilderness

Lake Louise, Alberta*

Ice encrusts your goggles at twenty five below.

Paths are sealed in darkness, Lord!

There’s no clear way to go.

And winter trails dim well too fast 

as eventide folds into night

with stars alone providing light.

The world recedes as ways fall dark 

and beauty drains from mortal sight, 

a silent prison sealed in white.

While woods are lovely, dark and deep

when viewed from lodge or well-groomed path,

sometime in life will come a test

when woods turn into wilderness,

when dark and deep oppress the soul,

when lovely turns to creeping cold.

Your mind harks back to life before

spent safe beside the hearthstone fire, 

which burns and brightens even now 

in warmth the lodge at Lake Louise.

You pause in awe of open sky

where holy visions crystallize, 

as early evening stars appear

with undreamed wonders pressing near, 

beyond all words but strangely clear

when set in stillness white on white

so far from lodge at Lake Louise.

But ice encrusts your goggles,

it seeps inside your soul, 

and time compresses tightly

to frozen snowy hell

its icy heart, indifferent

to choices and their toll.

So brave the cold,

embrace the pain

then take a step, 

and step again.

Led by the arms of God to life

or to the arms of God to lie

matters not in wilderness –

resolve sustains beyond despair 

if inner stillness shares the grace

of snow white peaks seen in the face

and placid depths of Lake Louise.

*This poem is condensed from “A Way Out of Wilderness,” a poetic account of Susan Richardson's cross-country trek while attending a professional workshop, December 2007.  Susan looks back on the ordeal remembering the combination of hope and joy expressed in the final lines of that poem, "[I'll] count myself the grateful lost / pursuing traces etched in white, / and reach that pathway’s end in time / forevermore the grateful found."

The Catkin Edge

Catkins swell the tips of alder 

and red-fringed auras of riverside maple 

soften the bare edge of winter.

 

A new breeze lifts the stale grip 

of late-stage February. Deep within 

the dead brown layers, spirits gather. 

I wish these days would hurry on – 

my mother’s presence pierces years to conjure sun 

and wrap the world in warmer tones. 

And I hear his gentle rejoinder, 

that faux-scold timbre, tinged with a twinkle – 

Don’t wish your only life away. 

Dad was the ever-enduring hills. She, 

an effervescent air-kiss, the smiles and dreams 

of springs to come. Now both are gone. 

I throw on a warm layer, 

zip inside my black hoodie, and huddle 

out back in a broken pool of light, 

wishing with mother for everwarmth 

and winter’s end, but feeling my father’s calm 

as if from distance. Stay 

and wash my soul in cold breeze 

beneath the bare-branch blackbird tree 

on catkin edge of wintertime. 

Winter flock of grackles and red-winged blackbirds

Riverside Maple, March 2014