The Brave Pedestrian

I have passed this way before And nostalgia grips me now Asks me to seek out old haunts Revisit old friends Peer into unknown faces Gaze into their eyes for a mark of familiarity Perchance to say, or to hear, “ I know you, although you Have forgotten me. We have met before And loved When you were someone else And I had a different face… “ And this, my long-lost friend… This is where you sorrowed For your many losses And we shed our tears with you, for you. “ See these trees that have grown so tall Indifferent to your existence or mine… We watered them together In a bygone age When they were saplings. By giving them our tears We gave them life. “ And these stone walls still echo Our whispers, our laughter Yours and mine. The dusty silences still hold Our memories frozen in time Although you have forgotten.” Nostalgia… Memories that are not quite memories But only a place in the mind where memories used to live… ...

I write this tinged with sadness. I feel sorry for us... For the tragic comedy that is the essential human condition. In the midst of a carnival of plenty, Some of us are dying of thirst. In the midst of a deluge of love, Some of us feel left out and lonely. There is no dearth of emotional give-and-take in the crowd of relations that we stand amidst... Father, mother, brother, sister, son daughter, spouse, lover... And yet we suffer bouts of feeling heartsick and unloved. Yes, I feel sorry for all of us. Poor forked animal, whose overdeveloped mind afflicts him, Ambushes him with emotions that have little to do with the present. Poor forked animal, who carries a baggage of emotions from the past, And borrows some more from an imagined future. Poor forked animal, who cannot be simply happy With things as they are. We live our lives with the sour aftertaste of Yesterdays and yesteryears. We live with the bittersweet foretaste Of what the morrow will bring. We live in a world that has...