Hi Richard....................since your into poetry.............ponder............
To do it all over, to live again.
Be born once more and do it differently.
All of it.
Not settle next time for less than what could have been.
Not suffer here in our latter days the fitful dreams of the things we should have done but never have and never will.
None of us should exist as men living out our father's plans and our father's lives instead of our own.
Even when we revolt against our fathers' ways, the rebellion itself is a mirror image of those ways, becoming an imitation of its own kind.
The dreams, then: saddling your pony in soft, evening snowfall - high, high Asia and twilight in a mountain village, a desolate place of mud and straw and cooking fires, where the universe slides together.
Or, in the low country and moving like a bowman's arrow, quick and silent through long grass, spear in your hand and gazelles on your mind.
Or casting nets where the bait fish gather, going where the dolphins run and one, lone pelican flies.
All of it far from commuter trains, far from meaningless retirement plans we will never get to use and bequeath to someone else, far from the vacuous roll of ordinary commerce.
We should have done those other things, the dreams tell us all of that, and the dreams never lie.
But we erase them with morning light and return to the lives our fathers chose for us.
If you had done them, if I had done them - done the real things - we might have had a woman such as the one I now look upon here in Mombasa.
Yet if we cannot have her, at least we have seen her dancing, a yellow feather in her hair.
But that was in a night fancy somewhere, though it seemed real enough at the time.
And the fancies of all men so become the dreams of each man becoming in turn the dreams of all men.
There are shadows from evening firelight and men in black robes, chanting, a circular sitting of them, knee to knee on a long sandbar.
We have been telling old stories and singing old tales of dreamtimes past, giving old warnings of women who dance and turn through the firelight and leave only their footprints for the mornings that follow.
And we clap our hands in ragged unison while the woman dances while the river flows and turtles sleep, smelling her body as she comes near to us, and we reach out, touching her smooth legs, listening to the sound of her feet on hard-packed sand as she moved past us into riverside darkness.
But all of it . . . all of it . . . has disappeared in the wash of work and responsibility and might-have~beens, and it all went by while nobody was watching, not even the sons of the fathers
Turns out you REALLY don't mess with her Granddaughter.
"No" is not to be used unless it's to protect her from harm.
Hope this does some good. AP/vic
as to "Pushing the Pale'" LOOK IT UP
a letter full of memory's, and love can be found down in discovery for the very first time seven by seven , to seven eleven and your headed to heaven.
In your journey you travel through time staying at hotels Writin' the sad eyed lady of the lowlands.
