Homing – a sonnet by Dan Campion

Homing

Life glides through us like seabirds through a mist
in search of land they’ve never seen before
but know each contour of and can’t resist
the urge that guides them through the corridor
of fog. To them, their island is a dream,
the sort of dream that draws a creature on,
though it may also be a mist. The scheme
is hidden in the flight, a pearl-gray swan.
The flock itself is made of mist, a skein
so vanishingly fine it’s hardly there,
not lilac, but a faint hint of vervain,
whose flower has the scent of empty air.
It leads the migrants, and the pilgrims too,
who take from it which north and south are true.

Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems was issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/