Narrowing the Path (poem)

Narrowing the Path

They came from stock of second, third, fourth best

They let it be, temptation’s shoulder squeeze (less of you, more for me)

Seeing unarticulated safety in hearing mirror likenesses giggle

Seeing an alter ego seem to nod approval

Everything cited some dense trick of the enemy

Every foolish ritual worth engaging, a sign of not caring

Even the thought of one thrown in the ditch still breathing

Even the sense a choice must slot in like a game piece

That innocents, the soles of their shoes never gummed with

That hair, that grain of sand, those things of time and place condemning

Freedom is a winged passerby too light to spring the trap

Freedom, which seems like peace, is uninvolvement

Always it had been true you could not circle in this pattern

Always it had been known that certain things you must deny

You bent in a wind and came carved in the ways it shaped you

You leave a catacomb of thin warning narrowing the path

Narrowing the Path

Heavenward

(2017, Stephanie Foster)