Poem: The Meditation of Travel

To warm ourselves before a stove
in a foreign province,
to rise early,
the wayfarer’s prayer
on our tongues,
to watch fish blaze through shallow streams
and think of home,
to shift our load from one shoulder to the next
and be reminded of the faces
of lovers that failed us
ages ago.
All these form the meditation of travel,
all these are not unlike carrying a cello
through a winter night,
the dark wood rotting
in the snow.

“The Meditation of Travel” first appeared in The Forward. Yehoshua November's first book of poems, “God's Optimism,” was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second collection, “Two Worlds Exist,” was recently released by Orison Books.