You cannot be at home until you leave and return,
having experienced the difference between away and back,
You did not miss what the house lacked
until the celebration of your homecoming
when you felt the burden of what wasn’t there. .
The eagle goes a long way off
from its nest in search of food
and returns in search of comfort.
She settles among the twisted sticks
and woven weeds like a queen
content because she has been away.
The younger son, too, leaves the nest of his father’s house
and ventures bumbling into thin places that do not exist
except in the margins bordering the ordinary.
What the younger son discovers away,
is a side of himself only exposed
in the tenebrous* alleys of the far land
where everything his father rejected
is waiting for the young son’s ‘yes.’
It is only when he is full,
which is a form of emptiness,
that he can return home
and teach his father vicariously
the lessons of the old man’s refusals.
The older brother stays.
He works the fields day after day
learning nothing
but what he already knows
again and again.
He can never come home
because time after time
he has hesitated at the gate
and turned back.
He has gotten no farther
than the familiar fields.
When he hears the dance music
at his brother’s homecoming party,
sees the fine coat and the sparkling ring,
he sulks and is angry.
There can be no party for him.
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*tenebrous = (L) dark, gloomy, shadow This Latin word was chosen
because it is related to the Christian Tenebrae Service or Service
of Shadows prior to Easter Sunday. The service has a somber and
confessional tone similar to the experience of the younger son as he
discovers the shadows in his own psyche in the far country. Of course,
in this poem the older brother’s anger reveals his own psychic shadow.
Parable of the Prodigal Son
Luke 15:11–32
2002