Flights Not Taken

[Photo: Big Frank Dickinson]

We are all familiar with the Frost poem about the road not taken; in that poem, which Big Frank wrote about earlier here, Frost writes "I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference." A close reading of the poem reveals both roads were equaled traveled, and the persona in the poem is only fooling himself if he thinks his treck was anymore unique than any other.

Well Big Frank was thinking - as he looked at the departure board: that he took the flight less traveled, and it didn't make any difference; or was it he took the flight more traveled, or equally traveled and it did make a difference. Who knows? However, the thought does arise: what if I had taken that other flight - or that one - or that one? Perhaps Big Frank will need to go back and find out. And that leads us to an apt poem by Dennis O'Driscoll:

Road Not Taken
by Dennis O'Driscoll

How tantalising they are,
those roads you glimpse
from car or train,
bisected by a crest
of grass perhaps,
keeping their destinations quiet.

You remember a brimming
sea of the horizon
or an arch of trees
in reveries of light;
then a bend that cut
your vision off
abruptly.

Some day you must return
to find out how they end.