The Lament of the Wayfarer
— A journal and poem excerpt from Fleeting Moments of Fierce Clarity: Journal of a New England Poet [Forthcoming October 28th from Homebound Publications]
Connecticut, June 2011
Often, when I ponder on grief, I think of the Greek epics and the voyages that separated lovers—one stranded on land and one set adrift upon the sea—both longing for one moment together yet unable to have it. Like Penelope in The Odyssey waiting twenty-five years for her husband’s return, holding a belief that she shall see her Odysseus again long after everyone had abandoned the notion of his return.
All grief is suffered upon an epic scale. When loss strikes, our world ends. There is no greater struggle than that of recovering from an apocalypse of death.
Having suffered my own losses and walked the long procession, I know there are no words to express the depth of the heart’s mourning. It is a woebegone eternal night of oblivion unto madness. Our life is smashed against the rocks of a bitter sea and we are left gasping for breath between strangled sobs.
The Lament of the Wayfarer is a reckoning. It is a promise between the lover and the lost that there shall be a reunion and, once had, there shall be no next parting.
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The Lament of the Wayfarer
by: L.M. Browning
When the day comes
and I at last clear this dense wood,
I shall meet you on the other side.
When the day comes
and my path comes back to the place it began,
we shall go on to that next place together.
When the dawn comes to this night
and I have seen you through the worst,
you will sit with me until I close my eyes
and wake in my bed, in that home I left so long ago.
When the day comes
and I can at last pull up the moorings holding my soul in place,
I shall journey to you and set fire to this vessel I dwell in.
Never to leave you again.
Fleeting Moments of Fierce Clarity
Journal of a New England Poet
by L.M. Browning
ISBN 978-1-938846-01-4 | 6 x 9 | 126 Pgs | (Signed edition)
List Price: $14.95 pbk | Save 10% on Pre-Orders: $13.45
This title will be released on October 28, 2012
Pre-order now at the Homebound Publications Bookstore!
Fleeting moments of fierce clarity are had when the confusion clears and the gray numbness that hangs about our senses draws back allowing us to see the world and ourselves with sharp relief.
Follow author and New England native L.M. Browning in her wanderings across the Northeast, from the solitude of her home along the shore of Connecticut, to the rushing city streets of Boston, to the tall-pine landscape of Arcadia Park in Rhode Island to the quiet edges of Walden Pond.
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