Devotional Poetry

Returning Takes Too Long

Returning Takes Too Long

It takes too long
to retrace my steps
over the shards of memory,
and across the petrified tears of yesterday.

It takes too long
to follow paths covered
with the dust of history,
littered with scraps of illusions,
and strewn with the bones of vain imaginings.

Knowledge cannot be unlearned,
and lessons cannot be forgotten;
the essence of growth is in the cells of longing,
of striving to go beyond the boundaries of dogma,
and of struggling to clime the wall of separation
between the creature and the Creator.

Evolution goes on,
as the soul strives the climb
out of the well of matter.

Returning
over paths half-forgotten
because I was intent on the struggle,
because I was focused on survival
and not the surrounding terrain
takes too long.

It takes too long
to find the map thrown by the wayside
when I came to the edge of its kingdom.

There is a point of no return
that once passed
becomes a hedge of thorns.

It is the journey that is important!

The path I traveled
was a marriage of fate and choice,
of chance and freewill.

The end is unseen:
it lies beyond a turning in the trail,
the crest of a mountain,
hidden behind a line of trees,
concealed behind a wall
or in a cave.

The Beloved waits,
beyond the point of no return.

It takes too long,
and is impossible,
to return to the beginning:
time cannot be shaped that way.

Once made the choice,
determines the end,
and each choice changes the future,
while carving the past in stone.

To return
would change time and myself;
it would force me to remake choices
already made,
and would generate another path...
a new future.

A future
requiring different choices
where my present self
could not survive.

Poet's Note: ▼

I don't know when I wrote this. It was inspired by the prompt: "Returning Takes Too Long".