Crooked Bridges and Simple Lessons

I have come to a place where I have more faith
in the crooked roads than the straight one.
In the rickety bridge over the firm one.
Still ground makes me nervous.

This was not always the case.
Once I believed you found things,
love, faith, work, life. You found them
and wrapped yourself in them like a winter coat
all thick and safe and still. Like a child
I believed in happy ever after.

Not so much any more. Happy is the moment
and some of them are glorious and consuming, but
the ground always shifts. I live in a world with
people and lovers and believers and friends
with different destinations than mine and
now and again we travel gloriously together
before our paths go…. somewhere else.

We can choose to stay with someone
even though our paths may diverge. And maybe
that works out and maybe it doesn’t
but often (yes!) it does, with a weaving,
like some Celtic knot that becomes
it’s own bit of art that never would have happened
had we gone our seperate ways, happy enough
that our trajectories dance with each other
in the moonlight.

Or we may not. I have lived that one too.
Discarded.
We may break apart and break, and go our own ways
rebuilding something mostly new out of the pieces
surprised somehow how that happens and how,
by some magic that God sprinkles over his idiot children
(like me!), something new emerges, Another bit of art,
completely different and often unexpected.

And so I am, you are, we are left with a simple lesson,
that there is joy everywhere we choose it to be,
and everything that happens merely changes the painting,
maybe from landscapes to abstract, but always something
that someone, somewhere, will love.

About this poem

On special days, like Father’s Day, New Years, birthdays, I tend to look back a bit more than normal. Mine has not been a straight road. It has been something else, full of broken bridges and things coming undone and redone and one thing transforming into another. I’d rather that not be the case, but there it is.

Oddly, and only God could make this happen with my life of twists and turns intersecting with so many other lives along the way, to create, over and over, something beautiful.

I almost called this one Kalaeidiscope. But I didn’t have a good picture for that. So I used this one of my favorite bridge from a nearby nature preserve in Hebron, NY. Twists and turns. Twists and turns.

Tom