Santiago

Photo by David Whyte (Lough Inagh, Connemara, Ireland)

SANTIAGO David Whyte

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside hiding
then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you
as if leaving you to walk
on thin air, then catching you,
holding you up,
when you thought you would fall,

And the way forward always in the end
the way that you followed,
the way that you came, the way that carried you
into your future, that brought you to this place,

no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,
no matter that it always had to break
your heart along the way: the sense of having walked
from far inside yourself, out into the revelation,

to have risked yourself for something that seemed
to stand both inside you and far beyond you,
and that called you back in the end to the only road
you could follow, walking as you did, in your rags
of love and speaking in the voice that by night
became a prayer for safe arrival.

So that one day you realized
that what you wanted had already happened,
and long ago and in the dwelling place
in which you lived in before you began,

and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise
that first set you off and then drew you on

and that, you were more marvelous in your
simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs
of any destination you could reach:

as if, all along, you had thought the end point
might be a city with golden towers, and cheering crowds,
and turning the corner at what you thought
was the end of the road, you found just
a simple reflection, and a clear revelation
beneath the face looking back and beneath it
another invitation, all in one glimpse:

like a person or a place you had sought forever,
like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;
like another life, and the road still stretching on.

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