The Parting of the Ways​

Issue 14

​That day, I stood at a crossroads of a sort.
I stood in the crescent of an ancient hillfort.
Before me, the rounded navel of the motte
rose cloaked in rusting bracken, and the steep
bare path twisted its way up. Half way to the top,
tree roots formed a flight of treacherous steps
between the twin Scots pines that made a gate,
one taller than the other. On my left,
another path led back the way I’d come,
between the ramparts of the bailey,
over the earthen bridge across the ditch
and out into the meadow. There I stood,
and all of life’s complexities converged
into a binary choice. I stood suspended,
caught in the crosswinds of diverging worlds.
Two futures, universes, pulled at me
until the hawsers that attached my soul
like a sail to my body
strained,
threatened to snap.
 
Perhaps I saw your apparition then:
a girl with long black hair that stirred in the wind.
Perhaps my soul began to split in two.
I only know the wind blew,
stirring the branches of a hazel tree
that stood at the foot of the motte. And one
branch gestured to the hill, and two
gestured to the path by which I’d come,
and all three beckoned to me equally.
I stood and listened, trying to discern
the old familiar music of my heart,
some drumbeat of decision, resolution.
But I could only hear the wind’s white noise.
I stood until the time had come to choose,
and still I waited for a moment longer,
until the wind quietened. A calm,
strange and fateful, descended on me then.
I set my foot upon the path I’d chosen,
and turned my back on half my heart.
For I forsook that meadow and the life
I might have had with you, and I,
I chose to climb the lonely hill of art.

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Taliesin Gore lives in an annexe in his mother's garden and works night shifts as a care worker. His poetry has appeared in many publications, in print and online, including Littoral Magazine, Reach Poetry and Stimulus Respond. His fiction can be found at MetaStellar, East of the Web and elsewhere.

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