Wanderlust

 

To walk the streets of Marrakech, the flaming deserts dune,

To see the domes of Istanbul beneath the Asian moon,

The dark creeks of the Amazon where hidden orchids grow,

To cross the green Sargasso where the sailors shouldn’t go.

 

The pyramids at Giza by the ever-fertile Nile,

To sit beside the Tiber and to contemplate a while,

Then in the streets of Bethlehem and by the Western Wall,

To stare at other travellers and to wonder at it all.

 

And thinking from a distance of the valleys of my home,

What need have I of desert wind or minaret or dome?

For what of mighty rivers and for what of painted seas,

When prayers for home and honoured hills can bring me to my knees.

 

There’s something in the rush of wind within an autumn sky,

And something in the crisp of frost the heart cannot deny,

A something in the winter snow that sets the seasons right,

Like starlight in a clearing sky that sanctifies the night.

 

Spring flowers in an endless swathe, a fortune at your feet,

The first fine flush of evergreen, the bitter and the sweet,

The waking wasp, the bumblebee, the cuckoo with his call,

And flowing full the burgeoning that is the all and all.

 

In summer grows for everyman the barley and the wheat,

While heaven spreads a banquet rare beneath the wanderers feet,

What god disposes man must glean and bring the harvest home,

To granaries in Egypt and to treasuries in Rome.

 

For even in my homesick ways I feel the wanderlust,

Full knowing that in home and hearth are pleasures I can trust,

Secure in thought that spring will burst while I’m in distant lands,

Full trusting in the harvest home without my helping hands.

 

I’ll see them cutting sugarcane on some soft scented isle,

And as I watch the butterflies I’ll turn to home and smile.

And thank god for the aeroplane, for jets and kerosene,

For travellers cheques and package deals and other things obscene.

 

For hire cars and border posts and cocktails by the sea,

And for the folk impoverished who wait on you and me,

For shantytowns the tourist boards keep neatly out of sight,

And doing well for commerce by not doing what is right.

 

This hand it has offended with each cheque that I have signed,

This world I have diminished and its people have maligned,

But still I can’t resist them’ not the pull of distant climes,

For after all, I am in all, a product of my times.