The Return
The Return
by Suzanne Doerge | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
It’s not easy, this return
to the busy highway we left behind.
Bones and muscles settle.
Eyes see only as far as our daily lives—
backyards, walls and computer screens.
Ears hear only languages we ourselves speak
as we lay down to sleep.
Feet, tucked under desks like obedient pets
or shackled to gas petals like handcuffs to briefcases,
carry remnants of blisters that chart vanishing
maps of the landscape we journeyed through.
Four regions of Spain hide in our closets
having snuck through customs
on the soles of our shoes.
What has become of the simple routine—
walk, rest, eat, sleep?
We are back to some good things—
a familiar bed, steady roof overhead,
being with the ones we love who know
where we are from.
But as we walk the streets, grocery aisles,
cathedral vestibules, universities and factories,
even the fields and hills just outside of town,
it is our souls that refuse to fully return;
they continue to stroll
with all the souls of the Camino
to Finnis Terre, the ends of the Earth.
Editor’s note: This poem is from Doerge’s collection, Footfalls: Poems of the Camino (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2022). Find a review of that collection in the Winter 2023 (page 36) La Concha. Doerge’s poems “Village Square,” “Fields of Wheat,” “Delight,” “¿Algo Más Señora?,” “Losing Things,” and “Tapestry of Luminosity,” which are also part of that collection, were published in the Summer 2022 (page 32), Autumn 2023 (page 13), Winter 2024 (page 46), Spring 2024, Summer 2024, and Autumn 2024 issues of La Concha, respectively.
