23 April - Roger Zelazny Poetry Month - Roadmarks

I thought this would be an easy one. Roadmarks. The Road Not Taken, right? Easy Peasy. (Though Baudelaire or Whitman also have their own claim. (Along with the Marquis de Sade, I now realize)

But the Road Not Taken has the bonus of winding up my friend Greg, Doctor of Mordred Studies, who hates Robert Frost for reasons that have never been entirely clear to me.

However, I began to noodle on it. I wasn't quite satisfied with that selection.  It was right in some ways, ("Two roads diverged in a yellow wood" is perfect for a Roadmarks poem) and it's not like I haven't taken the lazy or obvious route before, but I just kept looking until I found what I wanted to use.

Roads, by Edward Thomas, which was possibly the inspiration for the better known poem.

I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favorite gods.


Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.


On this earth 'tis sure
We men have not made             
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:


The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.

 
They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only. 
                
From dawn's twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.


The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal.
 
Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,                  
Though long and steep and dreary,
As it winds on for ever.

 
Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion tales,
Is one of the true gods,
 
Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
That by the roadside be,


And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter
 
At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer


Calls back to their own night
Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps’ press,
As Helen’s own are light.


Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:
 
Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,


Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
and their brief multitude.