poetry

If the destination wasn’t the point

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

then maybe the clichés,
the tropes,
the platitudes,
were true
and it really was the journey
and every road
every fork
every path
not taken,
mattered,
as much or more
than the ones
that passed beneath my feet,
dusty, gravelly,
well-trod,
and worn,
even though
some of them
led to beautiful places,
because tourists
sometimes get it right,
and I have sometimes
been a tourist
in my own life,
taking snapshots
of the big moments
while important
little things
happened off camera,
that I might have seen
if I’d changed
my focus,
my shutter speed,
something less
panoramic
and more
microscopic,
but sometimes
I got it right
and captured
the right road,
the right place,
the right time,
even when
it turned out to be
a dead end.