This week’s poem is inspired by the way life takes its own paths and you never quite know where a path leads, but also how the geography of life has changes with passing years and with the different life phases that we pass through.

 

Geography Lessons

 

First fifteen you’ve little say, internal geography is laid

By decisions of others the stage is set, a taste for space

Love for mountains, longing for waves.  By nature and nurture.

By chance and luck some paths widened, others fade.

 

Pushed and pulled we grow eager to choose our own hills

Next 10 to 15 a whirl of choices, map alive with

Keys and options, red and blue lines, the rush to see,

To smell, to taste, to touch, to try to understand.

 

Some paths not taken, others join with ours.

The speed slackens, you lose your focus on the map.

You’re carrying a child and it ‘s biology, not geography

That charts life for 10 or 15 or 20 years that pass.

 

When you find your mind on the map again

The family pack is breaking up, bit by bit, at varying speeds

In jumps and starts and after another 5 years

You’re down to one or two, with more space and less pace.

 

It’s time to pause, breathe deep, take in the geography,

Landscapes of chance or choice, time to consider, to choose;

The next 10 to 15, will they be anthropology or biology, psychology

Or just fresh air and green geography?

 

 

Dhaka 2016