Homing

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A poem about instinctive return: how perception falters, feeling misleads, and yet something deeper still finds the way home. In “Homing,” Georgia Shreve traces the subtle intelligence of eye, heart, and soul through misdirection, detour, and recovery, ending in a hard-won faith in inner navigation.

First published:

May 28, 2019

Published in

In “Homing,” Georgia Shreve builds a meditation on guidance through repetition, reversal, and trust. The poem opens with the eyes, where light can deceive even as vision continues searching. It then turns to the heart, which carries memory of prior passage even when reason and circumstance obscure the route.

As the poem deepens, direction becomes more precarious, moving through “dry holes,” “blind alleys,” and “locked gardens.” Yet the final movement refuses despair. Like a creature guided by instinct beyond explanation, the self still finds its way. The poem ultimately argues that home is not reached by flawless judgment, but by resilient inner orientation.

Homing

By Georgia Shreve

For all the tricks
The light plays on the eyes,
The eyes still find their way,
Guided by some inner headlight
Stumbling off course, again and again,
But still finding their way home.
For all the tricks
The eyes play on the heart,
The heart still knows the road
(It has traveled here before).
There are a million tricks
The heart plays on the soul—
Sending it to dry holes,
Down blind alleys,
Into locked gardens,
Cul-de-sacs,
But with the inscrutable genius
Of a pigeon or cat,
It somehow finds its way.

Reading Notes

What gives “Homing” its force is the way it treats error as condition, not failure. Shreve does not imagine a straight path from perception to truth. Instead, she stages a sequence of partial misreadings: light deceives the eyes, eyes mislead the heart, and the heart in turn confuses the soul. The poem’s emotional intelligence lies in this chain of imperfection. It acknowledges that the faculties we rely on are unstable, while still insisting that navigation remains possible.

Formally, repetition is the poem’s engine. “For all the tricks” returns like a refrain, each reappearance widening the stakes. First optical, then emotional, then existential. This escalating structure gives the poem momentum and coherence while keeping diction simple and accessible. The recurring syntax also mirrors lived experience: we confront variations of the same problem again and again, each time at a deeper register.

The poem’s central metaphor shifts from intellect to instinct. Early on, “inner headlight” suggests a guiding mechanism that is practical and forward-facing. By the close, that guidance is reimagined as animal knowing, “the inscrutable genius / Of a pigeon or cat.” This is a crucial turn. Homecoming is not presented as analytical triumph but as embodied intelligence, something older than argument and more durable than certainty.

Spatial imagery sharpens this reading. “Dry holes,” “blind alleys,” “locked gardens,” and “cul-de-sacs” map a landscape of obstruction and false arrival. These are not abstract obstacles. They evoke real psychic culverts where momentum stalls. Yet the poem refuses to end in enclosure. The adverb “somehow” in the final line is doing subtle but profound work: it concedes mystery while preserving outcome. The speaker cannot fully explain the mechanism of return, only attest to it.

In that sense, “Homing” is less a poem about destination than about orientation under pressure. Shreve’s voice stays calm, almost conversational, even while describing repeated derailment. The restraint makes the closing assurance more convincing. The poem’s lasting gift is its compact philosophy: being misled is inevitable, but losing one’s way is not final. Something within us, tested and often confounded, remains oriented toward home.