[Poem#14] As You Go

Real life, my dears, is only a stone's throw
from where you already walk. This time
spent embracing your mind has not divorced

you from life outside the ivy halls. You
have not been hiding, I hope, from the pain
and suffering just off your beaten path:

pain down darkened alleyways of your city,
in hospital beds in your town, in streets paved with dirt
on the other side of the world. That is the real life

that you have touched briefly, and now
it will be your reality. So throw that stone
to hear it bounce in the path ahead, and know

that just as one section of the traveling ends,
with its familiar landscape, another one begins,
with a horizon always just out of reach.
Your striving is the journey.