Life’s roads

Roads always go somewhere,
Like a many branched tree
Leading to tributaries of life,
Until there is only a trickle.

Faced with dark rolling clouds,
Or rays of a sun tinted sky,
Roads point in all directions,
Exist in every imaginable climate.

No matter which choice is made,
The journey of a short stroll,
A trip of a thousand days, always,
Choices lead us back to our beginning.

The value of the moment is decision,
Courage the teacher of the effort,
Living and learning from the choice,
Is the path to find our true self.

©2012, Donald Harbour

Vita hominis

“You are too hard on yourself.”
Harshly, I spurn the comment
indulging a moment of introspection,
examining the corpus of worms
those that incessantly eat at life,
gnawing away its fine veneer,
until all that is left resembles
a wrinkled hardened prune pit.

“What’s done is done.”
That profitable observation,
never a coin exchanged for it.
Having made the staves of my barrel,
forming my chariot of journey,
caught in the river’s current
there is no turning back,
once it rushes forward, nothing
but the roaring falls of Niagara.

“How will you be remembered?”
That is the folly of a human quest,
interpretation determines memory,
everyone will be what others want
belief is the only logic left.
Ashes have no memory, no DNA,
nothing that resembles what was,
anyway, it does not matter,
memory is as complacent as thin air.

©2012, Donald Harbour

Debris of a life

in the debris of a life
there is never found comfort or
useful desire for its remains
like stale pizza molding
among scattered paper
a collage embellished
by cans of flat soda
rank crumbs upon the floor
a child has been here
with a chant of rhymes
stories of the big bad wolf
the worst kind of evidence
of unfulfilled destiny
is there an answer to be found
derived from this discarded past
no beautiful swarm of butterflies
no thrill of accomplishment
no ship of love at the dock no
they have skirted this room
avoided the attracted sting of flies
pests laying their larvae of criticism
it is the insects reward to devour
feast upon ones disparate offal
to consume the rubbish collected
in the debris of a life

© 2010, Donald Harbour

A Wren Takes Flight

When I was very young,
playing in my grandfathers barn,
a tiny Wren flew through the door.
It fluttered to the topmost
cross beam in the loft where
singing a beautiful song it perched .
Barns are hollow creaking
structures, a place to store,
to capture. And so it was with
the Wren. Soon it poked at the ceiling
to leave where light shown through,
winging from hay bale to peak.
The higher it flew the more
frustrated it became as the barn
held it in. Opening all the doors
was little help for the Wren was
confused. Too many opportunities,
too much frame work to its prison.
But then it tired and sank lower
to land on the barn floor, it
realized the door was open.
With a great will and effort
it flew once again into the sunlight.
I knew then that bird is all of us.
Sometimes we must fall to the lowest
point to truly know the heights
of freedom we can attain. My heart
was bursting with joy, anticipation,
a desire to fly away. And I did!

Copyright: 2008, Donald Harbour