This Life is a Road

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This Life is a Road...

...and there’s something about a road
That calls for going.
                               “But where?” you ask,
And I have asked the same, and I have passed
A million others I know would die to know
If we have found an answer:
Passed them in little red roadsters zipping across
The interstate in the throes of midlife crisis, in grumbling trucks
Acquainted with the botoxed dancers
At seedy truck-stop bars,
Passed them in loaded station wagons lost
Along a country road or stuck
In traffic headed East or West.

I’ve come to doubt this something is found in the destination,
For always upon my own arrivals I sense
The often subtle summons of the road to home,
A summons irrespective of where I’ve arrived;
I sense the asphalt invitation
To go where I belong, to drive
Again the roads I longed to roam
And stay where I am loved,
                                            yet all the while knowing  
In time I’ll only find again
There’s something about a road
That calls for going.

And so I'll live the journey not the destination.
For we are travelers, discontent
With either here or there,
                                           a people meant
To pilgrim on and pilgrim on
Until we reach that home
Where we will fully see
That there was truly something about those roads
That called for going.   

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