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.

 

This poem is about: 
Me

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