I Kept the Second for Another Day

Photo from Wikimedia

Pride.
A pride of lions.

There must be hundreds of roads up for option in most lifetimes.
Who can even look them all down,
Much less travel them each a mile?
Sorry.

Any road might be a road not taken, if it calls.
It matters more the Good to be done, and Voice to be heard along the way.
Writing called to me.
I called back to it, “Not yet.”
Freedom, like pride, only provides opportunity – you have to make the choice yourself.

I chose a family before my flight to Royal Holloway.
Chose it as my first road.
Pride, care, protection and duty.
All of that and no regrets.

I kept the second for another day
When my family were toothed, and safe to hunt life out on their own.
Again, with no regrets.

But there, at Royal Holloway, once more so many roads
So many not taken
Writing as I did, without a break, in inexperience.

A road not taken is a nerve not felt
A prayer unspoken for a knee un-knelt
A chance forsaken, a bouquet not smelt
A wave unbroken and a hand undealt
A freedom shaken for security.

What daring soul powers every wave to sands?
Or knows all flowers? Or holds all hands?
Who has the hours to understand
That life devours what’s over planned?
Too many a road doth break a vein.

So daily I shall write, until it gives me leave
With no regrets for taking different breaths.
If my metre’s uneven and my rhymes escape,
Will that diminish the light at the end of my day? 

I said it when I started:
I’ve held everything a gentle man could pray for.
The beautiful of beautiful children.
The words I’ve won and lost.

And then came you.
You are the sunrise of my coffee.
You are the thoughts of my twilight time.
You are the tears of joy that run down my nose.

You are the Reward for what good I have done,
and the Solace for all that was wrong.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.“

“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost