You, Returning

And We Danced (M.A. Reilly 2008)

I.  Echo

Mary Catherine Bateson (2004) tells us:

The true exorcism of ghosts occurs when they are gradually absorbed into the lives of the living (p. 13).

She is writing about the role we assigned to those who have come before us--who are gone from the earth and yet, whose words continue to inform our ways and words as well. She says:

They remain in that place of memory from which all of the honored dead speak to enrich our thought, so that even when we speak, we echo many voices (p.16).

Islands (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

II. Photograph

Theories of Time and Space 

 - By Natasha Trethewey ( 2010) 

You can get there from here, though
there's no going home. 

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you've never been. Try this: 

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off 

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion--dead end 

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches 

in a sky threatening rain, cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand 

dumped on the mangrove swamp--buried
terrain of the past. Bring only 

what you must carry--tome of memory,
its random blank pages. 

On the dock where you board the boat
for Ship Island someone will take your picture. 

The photograph--who you were--
will be waiting when you return.

Fences (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

III. Returning

Preparation for life is preparation for a long meander through uncertainty, for working with partial clues and rough approximations, for skillful guessing and zestful improvisation. Even those facts that seem clear and unambiguous unfold into unexpected implications--and are sometimes contradicted by new findings (MCB, pp. 339-340).

Works Cited
Bateson, M.C. (2004). Willing to learn: Passages to personal discovery. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press.
Trethewey, Natasha. (2010). Beyond Katrina: A meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.