Past and Present Things

There are degrees you don't know    
Like a whisper as yet unheard      
A distant shimmering glow      
Though the way is yet unlearned      

***      

I'm the son of a follower of the god of war      
A prodIgal son      
Descended of wayfaring souls      
      
A strange pooling of names vaguely stirs      
Corsham and Dauntsey in Wiltshire      
Lane in Cornwall, and Berkshire      
Gloucester in Gloucestershire      
And somehow Haworth in West Yorkshire      
All distilling down to those last fateful steps in Dauntsey      
So they mingle and weave      
Now but faint traces etched in stone      
And on yellowed ink scrawled pages      
I don't know how they were then      
Anymore then how they are now      
My grandmother never said, "When I was a girl in Dauntsey before we sailed..."      
Never spoke of the voyage      
Just me with remembered remnants      
An accent dulled by America      
A garden out back and a time for tea      
     
My grandfather was another      
A fugitive, a refugee      
A non participant in a civil war      
How do the rebels, revolutionaries, and liberators differ      
From the governmental forces      
When both sides make the people suffer      
He never spoke of his childhood to me      
Or his journey...his English was thick      
As thick as his eyes were dark      
A machinist      
With a small shop in his basement      
     
He died when I was a child      
She, when I was a young man      
How did two souls from worlds apart      
Risking all on one turn of Kipling's "pitch-and-toss"      
Scraping to make a new start    
Find each other in a new land      
Somehow the Fates had smiled
 
My family were goers      
Closing the book on their pasts      
     
The other side, here for centuries      
Coming first indentured and lastly free      
Had roots grown deep like trees      
In the rich harrowed soil      
A blending of English, German and Dutch      
With a wee bit of Irish thrown in for luck      
Farmers and men of the earth      
Plain working men for the working day      
No fancy titles just common folk      
Folk of the clay      
I come from a country people      
     
But always comes a passing away,  a sundering      
I walk among the reverbrations      
A soft echoing of distant truths      
These whisperings of twilight ghosts      
     
I was a military brat      
And a military man just like my dad      
So too my cousins      
We served our land      
We, a mix of the old and the new      
A paradoxical testimonial we were American too      
     
My hand a stranger to the plow      
A machinist now      
With a longing for gardens      
And dislike of tea      
Who learned to love wildflowers bright      
Along the washed out grey of old country roads      
     
And so I lived moving from posting to posting      
Postings, deployments and a few TAD's      
Til that life came to end      
Here a few degrees cooler than Hell      
And a bit farther south of heaven      
The deep south      
A pagan stranger to my soul      
Waiting      
A distance is calling me      
A yondering      
My feet grow restless on the earth      
Yearning to be free