Pull your oar
from the muck,
where stayed
in static,
you’d been
stuck.
Row, row,
row your hope,
fiercely
against
that stream,
that demands surrender
to the pull of remembered
hooks set in tender meat.
“Go with the flow…,”
whisper wizened crones
and old sailors, unremorseful,
not because they don’t care,
but because they don’t know
that the furrows and ruts,
the trenches, each deeply cut,
were made by the mistakes
of the dull and thoughtless,
so long gone.
“Go with the flow?”
I suppose I will,
now that I’ve noticed
this life is a rut
and not a river.
Gone with the flow,
sail east, sail alone,
sail away, anon,
billowing hope,
in the sails
of a ship
once named,
“Hopeless.”
©️ CG Tenpenny, 2023.
