Poem: The Only Road Taken
Background: I had to write this sometime. My experience with life is often the singularity of choices, and time gets us there. The Universe’s acts are deterministic — a contrarian view of Frost’s views of deliberation of choices. Finally…
The truth is that there is always only one choice. Life makes it that way. However, empowered we feel about our choices. A different take on Robert Frost’s poem.
Poem: The Only Road Taken
If this was the only road to travel
At the junctions —
The crossroads disappear
The universe has its way
The permutations in my mind
Dissolve in the solution
No need for a resolution
All I have to do —
Is to put one step
In front of another
The only road is taken
If life’s only way is forward
But…
I could pause for a moment
And look back at the footprints
Hiding within as memories
I can look back only so far
Till …
The sands beneath my feet shift
Time comes calling
To put one step forward
As they say —
Life just goes on.
~Ashok Subramanian © 2024
Let us look at Robert Frost’s poem, the Road Not Taken.
Poem: The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~Robert Frost
“The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
