Parting Company

How quietly we come to the end — do we? —

of a karmic connection through many lives.

This time, we loved each other: with the body briefly, 

with mind and heart and soul in the years since.

But now he wants to build monuments, fight battles …

would do me honour as long as I supported.

He carries the blood of Cherokee warriors 

and Slavic shamans. He resonates with Norse deities 

and Viking axes. I follow a different path. 

 

The heritage, genetic or magical (mine Celtic / Hindu,

while I’m drawn to Egyptian and Graeco-Roman gods) 

probably doesn’t matter. It’s where we choose to go

this time around which shapes us; what we choose to do.

Even when we performed the Rite, he was after power;

I did it for lust. But I loved him too, not for the wild man, 

the joker, the adventurer, but for a core of tenderness

I saw within, and for his truth-telling. I don’t know why

he came to love me too, but he did. Perhaps for the same.

‘That’s your teacher,’ his angels told him, the moment 

when he first saw me. ‘Don’t let him get the upper hand,’ 

mine said two weeks earlier, predicting our meeting 

when we were still strangers, unaware of each other.

I didn’t forget the advice. Perhaps he did. Now

he thinks I have nothing more to teach him. He wants 

to instruct me. ‘You’ll be looking for me,’ he says, ‘When

they come at you in that final battle.’ ‘Dear one,’ I reply,

‘do you not know, Love is the greatest weapon?’

We are texting from different continents. ‘My circle,’ 

he says, ‘collapses if you walk away.’ I tell him I cannot stay,

will not, to be seen as a party to violence, and add:

‘Like a cat, I usually go my own way.’ He says: ‘Goodbye.’

Sharing this one, on 29 November 2024, with Friday Writings #155 at Poets and Storytellers United.