One Prose Poem & One Prose Fiction Piece by Greg Patrick

Traveler

By Greg Patrick

"Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.” ― George R.R. Martin, Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Call no man “stranger” who knows his own heart.

The caravan fires burn like pyres to the day’s dreams, red dreams in which one looks so intently

as to be lost in the silence of one’s own thoughts as each strays from the song played before all.

The ashen daydreams brought by each one like an offering to cast to the flames and betrayed in a

gleaming behind the depth of eyes alone. Not a reflection of the circle’s fire like starlight

microcosmed but one’s own nomad fire, as much birth right as the road, which burns so long as

heart beats to its own desire and in time with one’s own song and story.

A path concourse to fate, like walking against the fall of rain and man.

Like an endearment bespoke by gaze alone heard across a crowded room.

Though the guitarist begins the old songs, each is soloist to their own song.

Like the first arachnid chords of a dream catcher strung to ensnare an escaping dream.

Journeyer of one’s own path and stranger at threshold, strangers called to the firesong like stray

stories at the harpist’s beckoning touch at the string.

Dreams rekindled like embers; dormant memories awoken even as sleep flutters at the fire-cast

eyes.

Fire screams red with shadow like an ancestral memory and we remember why we travel the

storm-swept roads in the footsteps of ghosts, another “trail of tears.”

Eyes close to dream like a harpist’s eyes shutting to all but the gleam that answers the stars in

duet, not from the eyes but unfathomed depths of one’s heart, so lost and yet found again in

words and song.

Before dreams like a dark horse awaiting that has thrown each successive rider and champion the

nomad approaches with but one before expectant eyes.

Knowing there are roads that once undertaken cannot be walked again as the same

person nor retrace one’s steps and really go back.

In pursuit of aspiration like a falcon at the wrist, the falconer’s gaze uplifted

and fixed farther than he can see. And the falcon’s far gaze locks on the huntsman’s eyes, a look

that says.

“Let me go huntsman for that, I cannot bear you up after me anymore than weight of earth or sky

can be borne. Let us both go.”

Earthbound one seeks new worlds from the shore. Horizon and hills pivoted away from with the

same movement by which one turns by the fire in the age-old dance. Ageless exile becomes

wanderlust.

Homeland like castles built palatially of clouds by the eyes. Expressive gaze beholding and

bespoke a visual poetry. Memory crying out to lost dreams like a shepherd to a strayed flock

as night befalls and past revisits.

Way by Starlight

By Greg Patrick

 

I wish I could have seen it as it was and you with me…before trees were felled to immortalise

words on pages. It would not have been about legacy or about memory but the moment in times

granted the children of the desert…time measured not to clocks but the tempo of heartbeats like

sacred drumbeats throbbing in the soul.

Seen it when your sigh was the only music in the air and the duet of laughter’s echoes chased

each other like spirits of the glade, through the rocks, which was carved with scenes of chase and

harvest.

Before the cloudless sky was blemished by planes and the valleys and hills dissected with roads.

Before it was known that to construct is to destroy.

When the shrill cry of an eagle like a heraldry announcing the arrival of a princess seemed a song

in tribute to you. I wish I could have been there before men were expected to bow to crowns and

the raven hair crowned beauty in natural waves like keepsake of night that the sun could not

banish, like a treasured memory of an evening under the stars always on the mind.

Uncut, unshorn, a princess’s crown un-usurped by an imposed way from across the sea.

when it was no crime to born free…No zoos no prisons of bars, only the way back through the

desert lit in the stars. When there were no laws, only a smile that could not be done justice to and

everything seemed right, nature in balance like stars suspended in the heights

to light the nomad homeward, suspended as timelessly as a moment granted mortals in the

skipping of a heart’s beat, like the moment an elder raises a hand for a drummer to cease and

says” listen….”

That moment of a skipped heartbeat when smile like the muse meeting the poet, when vision in

an artist’s eyes cannot help but be a masterpiece’s reflection when the mirage becomes more

than that.

I wish I could have been there with you, when a necklace of shells in a tribute of tribes of the sea

and the carvings of the north where the sky burns…All seemed an inadequacy to the light borne

in the eyes the soulful gleam of the wise, of the vision of light behind dark eyes.

I wish I could have seen it and you with me when “freedom” was never used in these

lands, when that word really meant something.

When poetry was magic, and magic was the smile that was poetry in song so light on the wind

that man could hear it as the wolf heard the snow hare’s step, hound could hear the drumbeat in

his master’s chest.

When hair did not have to be shorn, the wolf did not have to be caged, and we were heirs not to

castles but the stone shaped by ages, heirs to the moment. When none were kings because one

did not have to be when the dreams were ruled by a smile that was lost in the dimming light till it

were the stars alone that held vigil and it was natural to speak in song and legends.

When “freedom” was not a word abused by many with blood on their hands. When it existed

like a poem without needs of a page, when it was defined by the feeling of the wind in the hair

and in the heart’s caress of a smile that was silence a deafening silence when a whisper was a

roar and one realised there was a river in the background and its sparkle had been dimmed

by the eyes of one like a poem written against the skyline.

In the natural silence that sang with dreams, silence set to music…when no hat was laid out by a

soloist to collect coins from the passer-by but a look from a brave all but said let us linger here by

that song and the stars will gather in celestial gold for you like a tribute cast down from the

heights.

I could never take the absence of the stars amid the city lights for granted amid the parade of

strangers past me but I never felt more stranger to the concept of radiance then when the smile

that proved heresy to faith in the city’s ways.

 

 

A dual citizen of Ireland and the states, Greg Patrick is an Irish/Armenian traveller poet and the son of a Navy enlisted man.  He is also a former Humanitarian aid worker who worked with great horses for years and loves the wilds of Connemara and Galway in the rain where he's written many stories. Greg spent his youth in the South Pacific and Europe and currently resides in Galway, Ireland and sometimes the states.