HOMO VIATOR

HOMO VIATOR


We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.---T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding


Sunrise on a highway ridge baffles us.
This could be sundown elsewhere by the bay
in Poro Point, a merging of origins, east or west,
a cycle of living and dying on the reef,
a coming and going on the harbour of fishing boats
and war machines, a pot of stirred calm and tempest
really, where remembering and forgetting are sides
of the same coin---memories made, buried, raised,
extinguished or lived again in a string of moments
that defines the journey of a man as symbol
of a moving object, wandering back and forth,
from nothing to something, something to nothing,
a Brahman-Atman, Alpha-Omega, being-non-being,
body-mind and soul all in one simple brownbag
of wonder and questions. Quite like that silly
white-tailed squirrel wandering, wondering
where it last buried a nut or a memory of one,
as its quaint prompter of an imitation of life,
a movement here, a movement there, all
really meaning a stillness of finding where
the end is one’s beginning and also his end,
a circle at last where the hole defines
life’s next of kin. One arrives home to ask:
Is anybody home?



---ALBERT B. CASUGA