Goodbye To All That

It's time to go. It's sad. I've learned alot, I've met some wonderful and inspiring people, I've failed to make a go of my degree. But maybe that's no bad thing. It'll come right in the end, yet I'll always remember York as a time where I came to learn a lot more about myself and what life is really for. Loved, lost, gained, sorrowed, lived. I wonder for how long this poem will speak so much to me...

Elegy.

"I don't have the courage to look;
even now when I pass that way
a pain in my heart slows my steps:
it says the gate is still open,
desire without hope is still sleeping in the courtyard
and in some corner, half-hidden, there is memory,
a heart-broken child with outstretched arms.

My heart implores:
"Let's go someplace far away
where no gate opens on futility,
no memory crouches, holding its beggar bowl,
where none of the walls knows the ecstasy
of longing for the beloved face,
and no shadows grieve for flowers that once were here.

I have done this many times,
dragged the burden of my body, estranged from me,
along roads of my own and foreign countries
where caravans of featureless faces, colorless lips,
figures with blurred contours,
are thrown on the screen of the retina,
a hail of stones on a shuttered window.

Each time this happens my heart warns me:
"Let's go back quickly
before this pain abandons us, before even this last sign
fails to tell us the gate is still open,
the courtyard lies waiting, spread out
with the hopelessness of desire".

If Brussels can be more than simply an escape route from a reality I don't want to face, bring it on. Otherwise, I'll know better than to run off one more time and accept my world, and my place in it, whatever it may bring me.