I knew her for the vagabond she was
The day we met.
It was not her choice then to be chaff
To parental whims, but it was her
Fate. And it was as if God gave me the insight to know this
Before I fell in love, as if warning me I was mating myself
To the wind.

She said it would be different this time, but I’d come
To the door and the rabbit in her father’s eyes
Was unmistakable
He hated my city and the rock it sat on
While I wondered if I could live
In places where peat bogs burned underground
And anthracite charred the soul as it did the
Heart.

Deciding that no, I would not make a hunter
Or a coal miner, I knew my lot was cast and
Fell in anyway. She was that much a siren to the aching
Heart that had birthed a hermit; her hand was
The only one I would grasp and go out to blind myself
In what I always prayed would be a glorious sun.

But luck is promised no one as a birthright
And though I believed that misfortune’s slag heaps
Had laid enough woe at my door for me to deserve
This one good bit of turnabout, I knew enough of irony
To know my end was boiling in some muddy stew
And bound to turn out wrong.

But knowing a thing, even in the womb, does not
Make for casual acceptance of its terms and conditions.
I became a skeptic and a cynic and she went on to
Live up amongst the hill people. Perhaps this was destiny,
As it was meant to be
But I sometimes think we were both thwarted
By the devil, and that, in her quieter moments
The vagabond wonders after me as well.

08/02/2010

Posted on 08/02/2010
Copyright © 2025 Ken Harnisch