Seeker Magazine - September 2004

You Cannot Call The Wind


by Gerald Bosacker


Return to the Table of Contents




The wind is wildest of the artful friends that we abide. When wind allows us share its vigor, then we know that she intends it for her pleasures. Wind will never spare our prized properties, nor pity our loss. Brash Wind maliciously turns placid air to storm and sets its path to capriciously toss down trees in winnows like freshly mowed grass, shaking steel towers until they too fall. The wind, like Kings, must be petty and mean and topple anything that grows too tall or clutters up what wind wants to sweep clean.

First primeval man, hunting his food, knew and used the facing wind to hide his scent, to stalk the meat he'd bite and chew uncooked. Yet uncalled Wind most provident did first present to man the appetizing smell of roasted flesh. The man could never tame the wind, the way that Pyrenees cave pictures now tell us man did with fire. For when he called, fire came. But man could never call the wind or turn it off like fire. Fire capitulated, to be his lackey, baking mud into brick, burn-hardening wood and giving light to see.

Man took skins from his cooking meats and fanned his small fires to smelt the metal from rock and learned to spill the glass from ash and sand. In one small tick of existential clock, hot fire was tamed in steel and trained to toil for man. Steam tools ate wood then switched to coal, then captured turning force from burning oil. So man enslaved wild fire, but not its dying soul which fled as smoke, bestowing poison source as price we pay for ensnaring wild flame.

The mocking wind runs free, a feral horse with fume-free power we are loathe to claim. Let's harvest wayward wind that does not smoke instead of soot-filled flames we rashly stoke.



Copyright 2004 by Gerald Bosacker (No reproduction without express permission from the author)


Table of Contents

Letter to the Author: Gerald Bosacker at Bosacker@aol.com