“Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake in the sea.”

Antonio Machado (1875 – 1939) was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of ’98. His later poems are a virtual anthropology of Spain’s common people, describing their collective psychology, social mores, and historical destiny. He achieves this panorama through basic myths and recurrent, eternal patterns of group behavior.

 

Jorge Luis Borges  

Of all the streets that blur into the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
For all the shadows, dreams and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time and Borges now are leaving me.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986)  was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator whose work embraces the character of unreality connected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, animals, fictional writers, philosophy, religion and God.

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I have combined two poets in this posting, one from Spain and one from Argentina. Both poems explore our experience of life and the elusiveness of time through the metaphor of the journey.

Life can be seen as a continual series of meetings and partings, of greetings and separations. How rarely do we realize that it will be the ‘last time’ we will do something? The last kiss we give a lover before he steps out the door, the last look we have of a place as we drive away, the last words as we hang up the phone. While we all have a curiosity about the future and what it might hold, that kind of knowledge would be a fearsome thing. If, perhaps, we can acknowledge the ephemeral nature of life without despair, we might experience the sharp brilliance and beauty of it.

Wikipedia has extensive information on both poets and I encourage you to browse their biographies.