We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage / And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, / We Poets of the proud old lineage / Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why ... (James Elroy Flecker)

2.10.22

Footsteps

I walk in the footsteps of an old self – mine – retracing that strange and painful journey. I pause at certain places … linger … look long. I don’t plan to make this journey again. 


It’s a pilgrimage. 


If, when I began, I thought it merely a revisiting, a ‘trip down memory lane’ (how blithe that sounds!) – by now I intend completion. 


I have been reluctant to let you go. I wanted to tell our story. The saddest story, yes, but also beautiful. I can’t. It sounds just like hundreds of others, when told. I perceive it’s not meant to be revealed – not in its every detail. It was ours alone to live, to know. That was enough reason for it to be! I only want to tell it now to preserve it, but that’s a false and foolish goal. 


We lived, we met, we loved, you died. I walk again, deliberately, in the footsteps of my journey with you, where our paths intersected, entangled…. 


I reach

that final crossroad 

holding

one last gaze –

your blue eyes

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