Fatigue and Wisdom, This poem is about pilgrimages & promises Options

[RonPrice]

FATIGUE AND WISDOM
We come to this mountain late
In laggard wonder
and atrophied awe
in distrust of the prompting of angels,
-Roger White, Notes Postmarked The Mountain of God, 1992, p.9.


Eagerly they leaned forward for they
were planning big things, big things.,
redoubling their efforts for that green
opposite shore where disappointment
would be their’s again. You’d think
they’d know by now not to be excited
in victory nor despondent in defeat.

They’d seen those pearl-promising waves
before, many times, and it always tasted
of untold wealth. Somehow, they never
saw the danger. Soon the sea would be quiet
and that frenetic passivity would again
invade their solitude; strangers they’d
be again, alone on the sand, perhaps
hand in hand.

It’s not that He had lied, but that we
had gone in too fast and keen. The shock troops
had just left and it would take some time
to move in on them, for they were everywhere,
powerful and there were always more of them
and so few of us, so very few, discouragingly
meagre, on a great continental front from
frozen ice-bone to blazing arterial-fire in
the huge deserts of the south. We burned
out there, down and out; we nearly died,
but crawled out back to life with bloodied head
and torn souls, some which never healed.

We move more slowly now, after those torrid years;
do not lean forward as eagerly, for you can only
redouble your efforts so many times before you
travel as fast as light and push the stone up the
mountain knowingly. Anyway, this time they’ve
rebuilt the mountain and we’ve found tears of
consecrated joy, amidst atrophied awe and a weary
wonder. You’d been to the peaks and got beaten,
good and proper. At least you’d tried.
Now you settle for life in the valleys and plains
and rarely lean forward to plan the really big things.
Civility has its own body language:
some call it fatigue.
28 December 1995
.