Chasing the Horizon
A poem
A poem
You can see it there, can’t you?
Just at the edge of perception, that thin line…
Doesn’t matter how far you walk, how fast you run,
it shimmers ahead of you, always retreating.
“One day,” you tell yourself, “One day I’ll reach it.”
You pick up the pace, pouring sweat, gasping breaths,
driven by the tantalizing possibility of…what?
Getting there?
Catching that insistent, flickering seam between shadows?
You’re sprinting now, closing in, so close,
you can make out the textures,
the dips and rises undulating ahead.
Just a little farther, a few more strides…
But then, it happens again,
that gutting shift as the horizon manoeuvrers away,
mocking your efforts
with its eternal circumference.
Laughing, you suppose, at this primitive delusion,
that such a façade could ever be mastered, seized.
You stop, double over, hands on knees…
Drinking in the arid reality of its repelled promises.
Maybe you were the fool for believing,
for investing this relentless chase.
Or maybe the horizon is the joke,
cruelly denying its own existence.
You straighten,
letting the truth you’ve always known settle.
That chimerical dreamline
was never meant to be attained,
but to coax you perpetually forward,
One
More
Step…
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