Dusty Roads

Karoo Sep ‘17

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We weren’t leaving much behind, not too much certainty of what laid ahead either.

But what was most important was the dusty road stretching out to eternity,

through forgotten foregone lands.

Towards strange stories, untold tales, bygones.

 

Pages waiting to be turned,

Unexposed celluloid to be burned.

We learn only through the road, through the undiscovered, through an open mind.

The car was fully loaded with no room for a distorted point of view.

 

For each one of us we had our reasons I guess, maybe pure boredom for the rest.

I want to make sense, of this, of that, of it all.

The stars seemed to help, the vastness to drown out and suck in all the noise that so blatantly travels along in the mind.

Suffocating the disquietude of the city with an ocean of nothing.

 

The dust kicked up, turning the sky into a thick orange cloud.

Reminding the by passer of his pure insignificance.

Some took shelter, while we waited. Opening another bottle of wine.

A cigarette was lit, as sun and time moved on bit-by-bit.

 

We are what the district we grew up in misleads us to be.

But out here we are all mere ashes to this barren land.

Some spoke and told the tales,

but the real stories would stay locked up behind their souls, those weary eyes, who saw sorrow like no man would grasp.

 

This life is holy and we must never stop moving.

Stop seeking. Searching. Forging.

With open mind and heart and always remembering no one owns anything.

And when you meet a fellow stranger along the way and have nothing left to share, kick out your shoes and dance and sing.

‘cause that’s all there is that this life still can bring.  

 

 

// Willem van den Heever

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