Salmon Time
by Tom Casey

Synchronize your heartbeat with the full moon tide.
Inhale the scent your home stream leaves behind.
Then harmonize the seasons that divide your life.

Now you’re living on salmon time.

There’s a rhythm when you’re living on salmon time.
There’s a feeling you’ve been through this all before.
There’s a certainty that life revolves and never ends
when you see the world through salmon eyes.

So let dreams of immortality decide your course.
Trust your instincts and your lateral line.
Balance your pectorals with your dorsal fin.
Then leave your dread of death and ruin behind.

The Creator of the sockeye and the Bering Sea,
The Sculptor of the Cosmos, by design,
handcrafted us to swim upstream and spawn new lives
and to raise ‘em up on salmon time.

Our lives serve out their purposes like cohos do.
Our fates are finned and scaled then streamlined.
Soon as winter follows Fall, scour out your fears.
Then all that once seemed common turns sublime.

From the gravel we all travel to a destiny
ordained by old. Devonian tides.
What we’ve become can be undone, made brand new,
if we’ll just go back to salmon time.