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This page contrasts the easy spread of east and west with the harder burden of navigating by the Southern Cross and the North Star.

The piece feels like a stripped-down directional proverb. It turns geography into difficulty, as if true orientation is not about broad oppositions but about holding to distant fixed signs that are harder to read and harder to live by.

Reported as overheard speech ('he said'), the hobo's wisdom inverts expectation: the broad axis of 'East And West / is easy', while the fixed celestial markers, the 'Southern / Cross And the North / Star', are 'hard'. True bearing lies in the distant constant, not the open road.