by Jim Scott, Author. Poet. Sojourner.

—

There was once a time when my life was filled with living;

Adventure and excitement scattered all across this earth.

I was in my prime, with so much just ripe for giving.

To wander seemed the reason for my birth.

But now my life has changed, I seldom travel fifty mile.

Adventure’s turned to mortgage. Mine’s a sedentary style.

My freedom’s now an office, distant romance an ex-wife.

I have to find the path that leads me on to my old life

So that just once more I can sail the endless ocean,

Or track the old bull wildebeest, and dive amongst the whales.

Watch the condors soar. Change my plans on any notion

To seek of lands heard in a stranger’s tales.

Is that so very much to ask? I’ve known it so before.

The hunger and the plenty, forest snow and desert shore.

The laughter and the loneliness, the passions and the pain.

But still there’s lands I didn’t see, and those I’d see again

If I found a way to undo these chains that bind me,

Not harming those I love nor running from the debts I owe.

I should leave today! Going where no one could find me,

Not caring what I’d seek or where I’d go.

But that’s now how my dreams are made; awake I see the truth:

The bank, the schools, the eight to five, so absent from my youth,

Now plot against my wanderlust, my yearning for the road

To hide the path I’m seeking that I once so freely strode.

But there’ll come a time when the house is bought and paid for,

The kid’s are all through college and the pension’s guaranteed.

Then I’ll start to climb back toward the life I’m made for;

My chains released, my spirit once more freed.

Though twenty years may lie between this moment and that day,

It waits on the horizon as a cairn which points the way.

A monument to travellers; emancipation’s prize!

A mark to set my compass bearing steady in my eyes

So that I can see that my life is far from finished.

And some day I will live again adventures yet untold.

Where the wind and me, with a passion undiminished,

Will find that younger life I knew of old.

*    *   *

Born in England, raised on the banks of a river in the Sussex countryside, Jim Scott from a young age developed strong spiritual connections with the natural realm. He wasn’t to understand this until much later in life when this realization explained the somewhat unique atavistic philosophies that evolved from his extensive travels and often ran against the grain of mainstream thinking.

A single father of three, Jim now lives in Canada and spends as much time as he can in the British Virgin Islands where two of his children were born and where, out of all the places to which he has wandered and in which he has sojourned, he feels most at home.

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Categories: Poetry

Tags: Jim Scott, life, poetry, sojourn, travel, wanderlust