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Flashlights

Chapter 21: TWO PATHS
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About This Book

A compact collection of lyric sketches, reflective poems, and stories in verse that illuminate fleeting moments of urban and domestic life. Through vignette-style pieces the author observes barbershops, cafés, and crowded public spaces, probing loneliness, social exchange, and quiet moral dilemmas. Other poems turn inward to meditate on longing, rest, and mortality, sometimes adopting epistolary or conversational forms. A concluding section offers narrative metres that compress human interactions into sharp dramatic scenes. Spare language, sensory detail, and shifts between irony and tenderness bind the sections into a mosaic of early twentieth-century moods and manners.

TWO PATHS

Today it seemed God bent to me and said,
“Pilgrim, you are weary, are you unaware
You have two paths?”
And I answered, wondering,
“Tell me of them that I may choose.”
And God said
“You have set your face towards a far goal,
To be attained
Only with heartbreak of endeavor.
It is written should you choose this path
Many times you shall faint and falter,
Raising yourself with bruised hands
And bewildered eyes,
And when at last
You see the ending of the journey,
Before eternal silence comes,
You shall hear
A little clamouring and tinkling of men’s voices:
But you will smile quietly
And turn away.”
“And the other path?” I asked.
In a different voice God said,
“The other path is short,
It ends but a little way ahead,
There is no attainment, no acclaim;
Only darkness, quiet,
Rest from desire,
And memory
In the heart of the beloved.”
And I answered,
“I have chosen.”