Travelling Home

There’s a sky that is a foreign sky

A cloud that rolls too high

There’s a mountain gives an eerie feel

As an Eagle’s cry

There’s a land that lies like a kaleidoscope

Of all the other lands

And brings back to memory

Fragments like cracks in your hands

There’s a time and a freshness of air

That you search for but just cannot find

And then there’s the touch of a tree

Like its bark is a layer of mind

And as you recall these things suddenly

Where you are seems quite bare

And you look about you for signs or a landmark

To keep you from this despair

There’s a thing that the wilderness does

-it calls you from the depths of your brain

It calls you to prove yourself brave

Be courageous and prepared to suffer great pain

There’s even a thing Society does –

It calls you to seek out fortune or fame

It says where you’ve come from means nothing

Go forth and make a great name

And even your own mother and father

Insist on you going somewhere else

This place where you’re born was your playground

Go forth and discover yourself

All these voices are calling you

And so you go forth in good faith

To board on a ship or a train or a plane

And you travel out at a pace

And you arrive in a great excitement

Full of yourself and own ideas

And it doesn’t seem to you like an arrogance

To have turned up in a foreign land

To face your fears

It seems you do what is expected of you

It seems living must mean to go to extremes

And so you throw your money at the carnival caravan

And you follow it like you follow your dreams

Except one day something is stolen

Some possession worth to you more than Gold

And it lies on you to be beholden

That a thing can be worth more than for what it is sold

And a series of catastrophes strikes you

And you start to see in shades of black

And it seems that the paradise where you’ve chosen to stay

Is beginning to want you to go back

And you start fights with the local lawmen

For not helping you when you were down

And they beat you until you’re battered and broken

Then they leave on the outskirts of town

And it seems too your dreams are broken

As they lie like shattered glass on the ground

And when you look into their mirror you are frozen

Into a thousand selves spread all around

Now you’re lost and you wish you had a home where

They all knew you, and what you are about

And so you figure you may start to travel homeward there

You’re sure they’ll welcome you back with a shout

And the road it is long, it is arduous

It is filled with peril and pain

And on the way many towns offer comfort and rest

The kind to which the Devil would not complain

But there is a voice that doesn’t shout loudest

There’s a voice like a humble refrain

And it calls to the boastful and proudest

It tells them to let go of being vain

And it cuts through the crowds like a fire hose

And it quenches the burning house of its flame

And it tells the Emperor to try on New clothes

And it tells you to remember your true name

And for the first time in your life you are listening

You listen and it starts to speak again

And the more time you give it the more its glistening

The more it shines like a jewel in the rain

It tells you to go back to your father

It tells you he’s grieved for your loss

It tells you not to travel any farther

No more the gamblers dice you must toss

And you wander over the mountains

And you travel out beyond streams

Until you come to the land of fresh fountains

To the home where you first had your dreams

And you call, call up to your father’s Homestead

You say forgive me for I was so lost

Your father embraces his Son who was a Ghost

By returning you are brought back from the dead