Found Poetry #Tanka Tuesday

I walk the same routes
I retrace multiple times
This puzzles people –
I walk to think more clearly
ever-changing, renewing

The above ‘found poem’ is derived from the piece here

Original Paragraphs

When I walk — which I do every day, as basic sanity-maintenance, whether in the forest or the cemetery or the city street — I walk the same routes, walk along loops, loops I often retrace multiple times in a single walk. This puzzles people. Some simply don’t get the appeal of such recursiveness. Others judge it as dull. But I walk to think more clearly, which means to traverse the world with ever-broadening scope of attention to reality, ever-widening circles of curiosity, ever-deepening interest in the ceaselessly flickering constellation of details within and without. In this respect, walking is a lot like love — for one human being to love another is to continually discover new layers of oneself while continuously discovering new layers of the other, and in them new footholds of love.

This renders the exchange of I love you’s — that coveted contract of mutuality — a strange sort of transaction, currency encrypted with change, with the loneliness and loveliness of change: In any love worthy of the name, the I and the you are ever-changing, so that the love binding the two is ever-renewing. But perhaps the strangest and most lonely-making aspect of I love you is that it traps the boundlessness of love in the limits language, as narrow and straining a conduit of love as the crack in the wall between Pyramus and Thisbe.

Image credit:

Art by Harry Clarke from a rare 1933 edition of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. (Available as a print.)

https://wordcraftpoetry.com/2021/01/19/tanka-tuesday-poetry-challenge-no-209-poetschoice/