All Roads End, Even Circular Ones. {poetry}
{source}
You know who you are. You know you. I do not. Perhaps once I thought that I did. I presumed to believe that doors were opening onto doors. That all doors were opening.
I wished you to see past my shadows. I wished to see into yours. This was a road that I imagined stretching before us. Now, years later, I see differently. Not with rancor or bitterness. Not even with sadness. Simply with a soft knowing that remains once the fog of wounding clears. And a revelation that my own heart is just as untameable.
So to each of you with whom I have shared the road with its junctions and steep, arduous climbs, and the wild helter-skelter descents from these peaks, I send my thanks upon the wind. To wherever you are this day. To whichever life you are living. The words are unlikely to reach you. Were they to float within earshot, they would appear foreign and unfamiliar. Yet the sentiments will travel as fragrances.
As pleasant music trickling through tiny gaps. A warm comforting breeze. Not ascribed to anyone or any moment. They are released heart to heart. Relinquished from expectation or reply. Returned with love to love.
***
All roads end.
This she knew from her own crusades.
Even circular ones
Because on the seventy-eighth circuit
She would turn to him and say,
“Goodbye, my lover of many lifetimes.
Now I must take another road.”
And she was gone.
All roads end.
Still the world turned.
Children were born.
Some died. Many grew.
Passed into adolescence
With their questions
Unasked and unanswered.
Clouds skudded across sky.
The circular roads turned
And turned below.
Until one day
She met another lover.
A woman with a strong cheekbones.
With a scar rising above one eye
Carving her forehead.
This woman would not talk of it.
How that scar happened.
When asked, her grey eyes turned
From passageways to closed doors.
Yet they grew close and closer.
Their bodies discovered each other.
New land was found and formed.
Love took on new shapes.
Relearnt to want. Relearnt the dance.
Language was born.
The road no longer familiar.
Trees listened as they pulled softly close.
But she knew because she listened.
To the voices within and without.
To the urgencies upon her skin.
To her own scar whispering within
Summoning her back to a circular road.
Where she would say,
“Goodbye, my lover of this lifetime.
Now I must take another road.”
Because all roads end.
All roads must end.
***
Anglo-Irishman Jerry Beale has traveled many paths. Royal Marine officer, international judo competitor and jiu-jitsu fighter, bodyguard, award-winning advertising creative director, occasional journalist and magazine contributor, performance poet, traveler, father to three amazing young people, observer and incessant writer. Jerry began writing at an early age. It became a way to review his feelings, a love of nature and the simplicity of dusk. Writing short stories, poems and essays became a casserole pot to allow sentiments to mature and hasty reactions to lose their tang, and they continue to be so. Jerry has read at bars, cafes and events in Los Angeles, London, Auckland and Melbourne. He’s had poems included in anthologies in the USA, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, and had his work read via radio shows and vlogs from Prague to Vancouver, but has yet to publish his own collection. One day, as they say…
***
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