Here the searcher’s tale:
A lonesome tragedy
Of the journey that ensues
If one is sent,
Most confident,
Into a world that’s free.
A cloaked man astride,
A hero of the night.
Illumined by desert sky
He considers
And he concentrates
On every stellar light.
In breaking dawn a falcon
Sails in circles o’er his hood,
And fading stars
Are harbingers
And sentinels
Of all that he’s endured.
Still the man is young,
Though fraught beyond his years.
That violent thought
Philosophy, has entered
And electrified
His tears.
A village on a hill
With wooden ramparts hung
Allowed the tales
Of strife and grief and certitude
To grow while
He was young.
Envisioned and invigorated
To proselytize with pride,
Throwing open oaken doors
To seek, survey
And subjugate the weary world
Outside.
Borne unto a plain and
Released thereon,
Fearsome snarling beasts
Impressed upon
His timid mind the searchers
That are gone.
Wider wandering paralyzed
And overcame his wit;
Dusted spirits rose
On every side,
Shifting to obscure
His writ.
There he dropped his gaze
To a scarcely trodden path:
He learned with close devotion
The intimations
Of the gravel, of the grounded
Epitaph.
Like aeons bear on canyons
And send ribbons through their walls,
His eyes grew tall
His back was broad,
His will and wisdom fortified
And called.
Let the searcher search!
Let him wander on.
Certain will he starve
If he follows not
To every peak and every deep
The dawn.
The sighs between entombed text
Now galvanized his mind,
Ever excavating,
With cautious step,
The tunnels and the quarries
Of his kind.
Some exhilaration
From the scarring of his skin:
Scraping granite truths
In effort to
By growing wiser, make
His armour thin.
Now heritage, that strangest weight
Oppressed his kindling heart.
Emerging from the dark,
Bound but
Not imprisoned by the stories
They impart.
And through enchanted forest,
Enchanted by his eyes,
The searcher wondered wilder
And soon forgot
The timber and the tools and all
That made his village rise.
Deeper in the brush,
Farther in the bramble,
He found a nature
Vicious, cold,
And virulent
As up and out he scrambled.
He searches in the cities, too
Under vacant spires
Burning, burning histories
Is he grasping
As they flicker up and flutter
From the fires.
Upon his knees atop
The ruined scaffolds of his time,
He grateful scraped away
Gilded rubble scattered equally
Like so much
Fragile rime.
The searcher hunches over
And surveys his soul.
The devils there he finds
Are far and wide
The friends and riches
Deepening the whole.
Lightning as a fickle guide,
He stumbles from his throne
And sees that all is rootless:
All his wondering
All his wandering, all
As barren as his bones.
The same that burned his ramparts,
The same that burned his throne,
These wicked creatures,
Wolves and men,
Had preyed and led him
Far from home.
Feeble and unhinged
He descended in the dusk,
Past the empty pinnacles
And caverns
And the rising soot
For paths that he can trust.
Clear away the cage, then
If it rigid stays
The searcher’s soul for you,
For all, is lost
Without horizon,
Without the open winded place.
Let not the searcher cease
Point him towards the dawn
Certain will he leave you
For the warming,
For not all are lost
Who choose to wander on.