The Way Forward

The way forward droops, fatigued, from too much
searching for it; a sleep-walking herd that
scorns the drover’s lash. If angels fear to
tread the weedy paths of what may be, then 
what chance have we, an erring child tribe that
wanders stumbling, wildered, and sad through a
desert of our own design, of sand grains
we have polished and put back under foot,
a worry-beaded landscape of grief.

We cry ourselves awake each morn and groan
our shattered souls to sleep. Anxiety
is become our consort, the thing we love 
the most because without it we are lost. 
It’s the fruit of too much scrying into 
magic mirrors of a deep-hated past:
our bleared eyes and misrecollecting minds
crack and rive the brittle glass they feed upon.

Guilt-saddled wretches, cold-trembling in the 
copper sun, we have glimpsed mirages of 
our former selves and are ashamed. But a 
half-considered sin is not a sin, and 
an uncommitted crime is not a crime, 
no matter how forcefully the unjust
and obscurely doctrinaire rabble may 
counter with their au contraires. And if 
we are to find a way forward, it will 
be by the sly bending of muffled steps 
away from the numb paralytics and 
gibbering sprites that would stop at nothing 
to stop us all—a retrogressing mob.

Striving to find hope is already to 
have found it. And in finding hope, the way
forward stands revealed in the honeyed dawn,
new, untrammeled, unclouded, unconcealed.