For Love Of A Yellow Wood Poem by Katrina Harms

thinking on
a yellow wood
the one made lucid and familiar
by a poet long dead;

when parted from its fame, it
became deeper and more lustrous
than ever dreamt
No lover follows into this
Hidden, unremarkable place
It is your lonely solitude,
the one with bark-made memories

that wood, unowned
Unknown to any who passed it by
It is eternal.
It is everlasting, always changing
A path once rambled yet
without your feet to plod and pave it with
wand'rous compressions,
disappeared and was gone forever
Will you ever find your way there again?

once you left and went there,
satchel and hatchet and sleeping bag,
you asked the water to call you back
To where you once dwelled, awake and uninjured
Before strangers took you as their own
before you were flesh and brittle bone,

before you walked the road more traveled,
and found no way to journey home