Where We Are

This poem appears in the Winter 2019 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

Where is home, if it is not with you
In whatever dark land where we wander?
Where the alien hills we travel through
Faintly echo with a distant thunder;
Where the ghost of some odd friend we knew
Shows up on a half-deserted street,
Waves, but has another thing to do
In this pleasant country of defeat.

Where we are, though, always was the center,
Where your index points from, as does mine,
And whatever strangerhood we enter
Now, deictic, changes to a sign
We were never strangers, always here,
Even in this December of the year.

Founded in 1957 by the great Russell Kirk, Modern Age is the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes. It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our age—to what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called “the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.”