The Walker
Location
A young man dressed in grey
Consumed in a subtle pain
Walks along a path
Woven, built, and made of frayed webbed thread,
A conduit for hidden despairs.
As if some vengeful deity
Has woven him a personal quilt of hopelessness.
But he walks along the path.
He is notable in doing so
And he has remained for quite a while.
Other travelers dressed in their own cloaks
Of their own peculiar unique shades
Do encounter him upon occasion.
But most of them have no lantern
It is the law of nature
That this sort of darkness cannot be penetrated
Without a lantern.
And so, at best, these travelers
Without lanterns who encounter him,
Bestow him with their pity.
Stale bread which he discards,
And at worst they scorn him
And because they are consumed
With walking their own paths,
They do not bother to examine
Any further than that.
But there is a group of travelers
Walking in the shape of men,
Of the purest sort,
Who soar above whatever sky
There may be, flying on the winds of joy.
And when they look down
They look with the strongest light of all.
A vision which is ten thousand times
As strong as any carried lantern.
They look down at the walker
And see the threads which weave into his true cloak,
Which perhaps has some deep greys at the hem, but mostly is a deep warm hearth crimson.
What a glorious warm ray of sun is waiting for the walker,
if only he could see beyond the cloudbank.
It is the truth of nature
That each self’s path is its own.
And each self must build his own wall of stone
To guard his estate.
Whether he acknowledges it or not
Is a question as unanswerable
As the falling of a feather in the wind.
The walker comes upon this special group of travelers.
Their cloaks are of all colors
Each unique from the others
This group of fellow travelers
Had traveled about as far he
And in fact, it should be noted,
That in the grander scheme
Of all travelers who had ever walked
Along the path, this was not
Very far at all.
And they accepted him
And they told him,
That when they looked at him,
They did not see a grey cloak,
Only a beautiful hearth-red
With perhaps a hint of grey
They offered him brotherhood
And sisterhood,
And so the walker
Bothered to ask himself
What his destination was
For he had been traveling on the path
For so long that he hadn’t given a thought
To his destination,
But he managed to remember what he thought
Was his original destination.
“I am trying to find a warm place
To bask in the breath of the glorious wind, In the company of those who wish to do the same.”
And so he knew it was time to
Cease his traveling,
Put down roots as a strong oak,
Be content with the ground on which he stood
Among his fellow growing trees,
Gathering stones from the quarry nearby,
Which glitters under silver sunlight,
And build a ladder.
There was no longer need to carry the burden alone
For he could work with brothers and sisters,
To build a ladder together with them,
Into the sky
So that they may sit together,
And bask in the breath of the sweet wind.