What do you call the phenomenon of having your perspectives of close-held values and sacred convictions skewed by the pressured experiences of life, by your suffering, by your pain?  Perhaps, as a friend recently suggested, it might be called the “fog of war.”  As the sun burns away the fog, so light and truth and goodness lift the weighted mists from the mind and from the soul.  Persevere.  Have hope that the fogs and mists of your wilderness will clear, revealing bright, warm, blue skies, and the path ahead.

THE VALLEY

Fog fills my valley
dense and gray

the fog of war

church steeple tip
pokes through into the blue
soft bleatings echo
sharp barking

I walk a cobbled street
wet and slick from this
low valley mist
climbing into me
chilling, and choking

mist of battle
fog of war

and I wonder
if the fog will lift
if the sun
the blaze
will burn off and away

the fog of war, the fog
of war

so I can see
the hot bread bakery
the aromatic café
the barbershop and the haberdasher’s
the park with fountains
and great colored sycamores
so I can see
the white church with its cross-topped steeple
at the end of my cobblestone street
obscured betimes

in battle’s mist
in fog of war

Roger is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road.  The book tells the true life story of an obscure farm road and its power to transform the human spirit.  The book is available in print and for Kindle at Amazon.  See Rabbit Lane reviewed in Words and Pictures.