Travel Blog: May 2006

Sunday, May 14, 2006

The Heavy Axe (poem)

Doesn't that axe get heavy?
The one you keep grinding every day?
The one that hangs upon you,
Draining your strength away?

To support it you must purchase
Stones aplenty, oh so many stones.
And don't forget the extra axeheads,
To replace the shattered ones.

You grasp it as a corpse would
A deathgrip upon the shaft
While all around you unencumbered
People blithely pass.

They see you fall behind them,
Lugging that burdensome thing.
Your hot hatefulness consumes
To ashes any chance of reasoning.

The Mariner killed the Albatross.
You took up the axe.
Coleridge teaches hope here.
But you have to choose to act.

Rigid inflexible thinking,
Hidebound by your generation,
Never letting opportunity escape
To clumsily hack and rend.

What at first engendered alarm,
Anxiety, and strife,
Quickly faded to pity,
For the paucity within your life.

The paths gleam before your blindness.
Those resplendant glittering roads
With innumerable people upon them,
A living river of the soul.

Loose your grip, the scales will fall;
The heart relents her vanity.
Loose your grip, the axe will drop;
Welcome back to your humanity.

poetry
poem