This poem was inspired by the BBC story of a young male tiger who being tracked walking 1300 miles looking for something.

::::::::

Circle up.
Hold hands.
Look around.

Look across.
Look at your feet.
Look at all the shoes.

Shoes with feet in them.
We make a good circle.
Circle of people.

Is life a circle?
Where is the circle of life?
Is there a bigger circle?

Why can't I see it?
Is the Koala in it?
Is the house spider in it?

What about that tiger?
A tiger is walking 1,300 km.
It left its home in a sanctuary.

It weaved back and forth.
It is being tracked.
It is wearing a radio collar.

It's just two years old.
Nobody knows why it is walking.
Will it find the circle?

What's wrong with our circle?
What's wrong with just people?
Isn't people good enough?

Is this a circle of commiseration?
Prayer?
Community?

Friendship?
Faith?
Hope?

I left that circle.
I left the sanctuary.
1000 km, weaving, searching.

(Article changed on December 3, 2019 at 21:27)

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.