Routes Poem by Jerry Pike

Routes

You tied the knot in sixty-one,
with strings that touched my heart,
each delicately single-bowed,
around some maps you’d never showed,
of Swiss des Alpes or Finnish road,
you’d passed but didn’t start.

The lady on the cover eyed,
with gay priority,
a fur draped down beneath her crook,
not stole, but precious, and she’d look
as he unfurled life’s folded book,
they topped the world, you see.

Another tour by rapid wheels
of Norton I believe,
within a German market square,
as Hitler youth salute the air,
you stumbled on a World War fair
a traveller on reprieve.

Across the world in fifty years,
adventuring your mind
South Africa, Sardinia, Spain,
all melted down beneath the rain,
that wept through cracks, then down my drain,
as history went blind.

Now all’s a pile of sodden pulp
with peaks and peeks of then,
your signature, a date, some cost,
with wholesale wandering freely tossed
into the foray that I’ve lost,
my Father’s routes to Zen.