The pilgrim

 

How to ease the conscience

off the burden of love?

The seductive, sweet meandering

across the rubbish labyrinth of emotions,

Was it the blazing heat of passion

or the unhurried touch of innocent love?

Whatever it was but I’m a pilgrim now

seeking peace for the soul

with a broken heart,

Purifying myself with bitter tears,

which are sometimes tears of raze.

 

The proven infidelity of love

giving an affliction of the soul,

With a speared heart

the pilgrim seeking the secret code of love,

And the bleeding stones and thorns on the path,--

her inflaming proofs of disloyalty.

 

Thus the pilgrim goes

still holding the image of that thorny rose,

Mournfully reciting the hymns of misery,

Gathering the rotten, sour fruits

fallen from the sweet tree of love,

The wayside bushes snubbing

with perfidious, malicious sneer;

boughs crinkled with wrath

like natural brutality in her heart.

 

Pilgrim, where are those adolescent jaunts

and big reserves of steely character?

Thou turned out to be a soft prey,--

the stone cut by a blade of grass,

The air sighing with

disillusionment and disenchantment,

Ruined memories scattered around,

The mirrors of falsehood surround,

Her velvet, docile dove’s gait

hid a haughty heart’s clawy bait,

Her starry splendor

was full of devouring despondency,

Her slender courtesy

hid savage snares for masculine fantasies.

 

All along it was love without hope,

It made me prone to

dupe my own pride,

Now, the solitary sandy swirls of

her lovemaking resonance

wafting with exultation around,

And the pilgrim walks with

his wounded masculine pride,

shorn of light and gallantry in the eyes,

Memories echoing like horse hooves

on cobblestones in the dead of night,

striking at love’s cuts and bruises.

 

The pilgrim lost in the pale mists of memories,

Moving like a mule

carrying saddlebag of stoicism,

All soiled with her illicit love,

the pilgrim goes seeking

the oasis of love.

 

The desert has its storms,

The pilgrim has his own,--

bristly and jumble of nerves,

enigmatic and conglomeration of oddities,

There I go on the pilgrimage of loss

and after long-long barren miles

I gain something,--

a sad but dignified autumnal smile

in lieu of all her sweet guile.