Paths
By Odin Roark

And should you walk...

Upon scorched earth,
what might you feel,
your bare feet
now scarred
with callouses of time?

Today…

Not unlike other days,
affords trails well trodden,
where hidden playgrounds of youth
are but ash and cinder
atop buried promises,
gilded routes once trusted.

Looking skyward…

Still standing,
global guide signs point in all directions,
their posts of charred insistence
like paternal obstinacy,
refusing to admit folly,
even as their gathered intel
from the likes of doctors Spock and Watson
now flutter as yellowed pages,
forever distant.

For what prepares innocence…

This capacity to absorb,
to trust authority,
whose surety of agendas,
at times conscious,
often unabated primal instincts
serving with duplicity's
velvet tongue?

Still…

The paths,
like aged depressions
wrinkling the face of history,
outlive,
outlast,
and stretch beyond our perspective,
beyond civilization's struggle.

Even as the innate impulse
to survive any and all storms
drives man into nature's forest of density,
one's tangled foliage of belief
remains destined to confront
encountered weed and vine,
without which survival is but a word.

Please!

Cries the waif
hidden beneath its barren exposure,
find me but a grassy field
where blistered soul and feet
might rest,
where mirages
cease to exist.

All the while…

Through swirling dust
and acrid air,
a child’s hands reach out,
urging patience forward
as it’s emaciated shoulders press forward,
pointing with gentle fingers
toward the horizon,
wanting to lift his eyes to a sky of freedom,
but faces only more clouds of darkness and hurt.

Such are the many paths of history.