Let out to explore new places,
our whole bodies become ours again.
Cloaked in the anonymity of away,
without the false adrenaline of duty
marching us forward hurried,
our knotted shoulders unroll
into the soft posture of vacationing
couples whose sunlit day packs
are the heaviest burden
their backs must bear.
Unbound from everyday,
our empty hands dance open
recalling what they did naturally,
before they became machines assigned
to hold onto what we don’t want to lose.
Our best days are when we are strangers
lost in the landscape of new questions,
our schedules so loose that we lean our heads
to just listen...and find ourselves in love
with the possibilities of every sound
we hear: laughter, children, traffic, songbirds,
and the happy whir of our own thoughts
escaping the home of our heads.
Anne McCrady, 2016