They Also Traveled Alone

They Also Traveled Alone

(“And you, my sheep, the sheep of my pasture, are my people, and I am your God, declares the Sovereign Lord.” Ezekiel 34:31)

It wasn’t a game, this vagabond life unleashed
near the end of marking the map carefully, reading
the words like carpentry, measuring twice and cutting once,
never allowing the slightest variance, never taking the unlost
navigation of nuance.

Who would leave me? Who would stay? Who would say nothing
so I never knew either way? The landscape was gray, the air
heavy and filled my lungs like lead, like the dread of becoming
a gypsy alone.

It should not matter, I told myself. I need to get where I am going,
though the destination is befogged with doubt and unknowing. It
should not
matter. I could tell others had traveled the same route, and by the
footprints I knew, they also traveled alone.

I was too old to wander, too far along to travel that far from home.
I was too lonesome to travel single, but no one I knew was on the path.
I was too unsure to travel friendless, though some spoke on my behalf.
But all I wanted was provision to make it home, all I needed were
contributions to shorten this exile with a check or a song.

You see, I know less than I knew before. I probably know less
than the initiates at baptism’s door. I’ve shed so much skin,
emptied the backpack entirely. The days and empty sidewalks,
the pain and the silence are grinding me down to the barest bones
of belief; the dust of a soul undone.

This detour seems like a moving away from faith and
the beginning of unbelief. The destination stays clouded,
the navigation unclear.

Yet, less knowing than hoping, in the emptiness, the thinness,
the silence and the desolation, there was, not much more than
the opaque slice of dreams, another who walked with me,
another who watched my feet, another who believed in me
better than all my unbelief. I’m still a vagrant and I still wander,
but I wish I could travel far beyond the sign posted “lost”.
Then, maybe then,
another would discover me waiting where the streams run dry and
the meadows have turned to brown.