The Road Walked
It’s hard the road
you have to walk,
it’s hard to get
across.
When your heart is
breaking,
from a great and grievous loss.
Others have traveled
before you,
have struggled
through night,
they’ve walked through endless darkness
and come out into the
light.
The track is marked
with footprints,
where countless
souls have passed,
through the gates of
suffering,
they’ve found their
peace at last.
So please remember
this,
when sorrow comes one day.
others have walked
the road before you,
they too have come this way.
The Smoke Jumper
If I be the first of
us to die,
Let grief not blacken
long your sky.
Be bold yet modest in
your grieving,
There is a change,
but not a leaving.
For just as death is
part of life,
The dead live on
forever in the living.
For all the gathered
riches of our journey,
the moments shared,
the mysteries explored,
the steady layer of
intimacy stored.
The things that made
us laugh or weep or sing,
The joy of sunlit
snow or first unfurling of the Spring.
The wordless language
of look and touch,
the knowing,
Each giving and each
taking,
these are not flowers
that fade,
nor trees that fall
and crumble.
Nor are they stone,
for even stone cannot
the wind and rain withstand
and mighty mountain
peaks in time reduce to sand.
What we were, we are,
what we had, we have.
A conjoined past
imperishably present.
So when you walk the
woods where once we walked together,
and scan in vain the
dappled bank beside you for my shadow,
or pause where we
always did upon the hill to gaze across the land,
and spotting
something, reach by habit for my hand,
and finding none,
feel sorrow start to steal upon you,
Be still,
close your eyes,
breathe,
listen for my
footfall in your heart.
I am not gone but
merely walk within you.
By - Nicholas Evans
