The Same, Always And Never Poem by Frank Avon

Some things are always the same
and never the same twice.

Take National Geographic.

In its bright yellow cloak
for years and years
since I was a kid
stuck in study hall,
restless and limited,
it has bade me escape
the here and now,
the this and me,
and explore what
otherwise
I can never have explored.

Now it's May 2015,
and at age seventy-seven,
once again
I am that wide-eyed teen
I was once before:

breaking the communication barrier
between dolphins and humans,
seeing with sound,
an alien intelligence sharing our planet;

taking back Detroit,
with the nation's largest urban bankruptcy
in the rear view mirror,
with plenty of empty space to fuel the imagination;

on a quest for a superbee,
saving the world's most important pollinators,
bumbling and buzzing with these industrious insects,
searching flowers for tiny drops of nectar;

harnessing the Mekong,
from China through Laos, Myanmar, Thailand,
Cambodia, and Vietnam to the South China Sea,
its dams devastating;

walking the way,
more than a thousand miles on the Camino de Santiago,
a centuries-old Christian pilgrimage,
to the cathedral where are enshrined the remains of St. James;

until the very last page,
on July 8,1927, in Vulcan, Alberta,
watching a tornado
from an open auto in the loupe.

Ah, yes,
always the same
and never the same twice,
always dangerous, in the safety of its pages.