Mountains of Delight - Poem by Ivan Donn Carswell

The problem was the manner of choice
(or whether there was a choice for that matter)
as you had taken those options to yourself,
choosing as you had to do, and as it was right for you,
there is no shame in that – and no reproving,
but my alternatives were emptied by your doing.

I define the weight of that odd convention
and what I attribute as logical is not natural
in terms of your reality, or contaminated by notes of practicality,
I am anxiously divorced from those restraints, halfway to lunacy’s
sanctuary where my unqualified knowledge provides
an illusory defence against what fate prescribes.

Oh, I hoped for a better life with fairytale ending,
a sympathetic resolution which implies
a fairer fate. It is far too late to make it thus I know, but I
won’t abandon my greatest ally, who was born
out of the same romanticism and grew worldly wise by my side,
steadfast and true, at least in the light of my colour-blind eyes.

So I cannot choose other than this singular place
where I already am, a place of which you know as I do
that there is no manner of choice in the matter.
And I accepted that irrevocably when I chose you.
It was never a question of winning or losing,
it was purely a matter of simply choosing.

Can we face this flight in concert and not judge
the road to come by looking backwards
where we’d find no pathway we could climb?
The mountains of despair which rise
out of the distant past are no surprise; our plight
should make them mountains of delight.
© I.D. Carswell
Anita, on her birthday,
June 13th 2005