“True love, especially first love, can be so tumultuous and passionate that it feels like a violent journey.” - Holliday Grainger
Poetry Jam has its theme this week “journeys”. Participants are asked to think about journeys and offer a poem relating to a literal or figurative journey. Here is my offering:
The Voyage
I am readying myself for a long voyage
On an ocean of tears wept long ago.
Dry-eyed now I fashion out of the fragments of my heart
A new, sea-faring ship with sails unfurling.
I am readying all that I shall take with me
Wrapping it in a cloth woven of old sorrows -
Would any other contain loss, despair, defeat?
Would any other wrap bitterness, pain, regret?
I am readying myself for the stormy seas ahead
By burning my remembrances, tearing my maps,
Scraping my tablet’s wax, denying all that I have learnt
Effacing dearly paid for past experience.
I am readying flesh and soul that they endure
New hardships, new sufferings, new betrayals.
I take with me the same knife that wounded me before
Resigned to let it test my scars for yet new pain.
And then what if before my voyage ends,
Even as I set my eyes on distant and welcoming new shores,
What if it should come to pass
That my feeble craft fail and sink?
That would not stop me boarding it,
I am ready for the shipwreck,
For after all I have survived a shipwreck once before...
I like your use of metaphor here. And the picture is excellent to go with it. I do hope you have a good journey this time despite the possibility of shipwreck.
ReplyDeleteWe risk sinking each time we sail but we keep sailing.
ReplyDeleteall life is a journey and so much is like being in a sail boat great poem
ReplyDeleteWow! this is so essentially awesome, i luv the message of staying strong and the mood of understanding challenges
ReplyDeleteHave a nice Wednesday
much love...
A life lived with no regrets is a life well lived, so I think we all must take such voyage.
ReplyDeletei would love to have lived in an age when there were ocean going vessels...now that would have bee quite the journey...but challenging as well....life is a journey, that is the metaphor...and if nothing else, the journey will always be interesting....
ReplyDeleteI do like the way you played with the extended metaphor - including the possibility of sinking or of a shipwreck.
ReplyDeleteI think that when we set sail we must be prepared for a shipwreck. We don't wish for one, but we have to accept the possibility. It is good to take old sorrows along. The ideal would be to dump them all overboard before one approaches that distant shore.
ReplyDeleteHi Nicholas long time since I've been here. I very much enjoyed your poem Happy New Year :)
ReplyDeletegreat job, enjoyed it
ReplyDeleteJourney To Someone's Heart
Nicholas,
ReplyDeleteLoved this voyage, as per the trials and tribulations one can come across in life itself...The expectations and the disappointments. Each a facet of the experience involved...
Eileen
You are a survivor. Keep on a sailing the ship of life Nicholas!
ReplyDeleteOh, to avoid the shipwrecks and harbor safe! That would be my goal. But each of us have to survive a few shipwrecks in life, I guess. Makes the safe harbor all that much more delightful! Powerful poem.
ReplyDeleteYour cloth of old sorrows --- a powerful image. I wonder: is it sleek and smooth and tight, or is it loosely woven so that it breaks apart at every touch? Well-crafted work!!!
ReplyDeletePowerful poem!
ReplyDelete…If you are burning your remembrances, then please also get rid of the knife.
ReplyDeletePowerful.