Bay to Ocean Journal: On a Path Austere and Certain by Diana Fusting

Author’s Note: So much in today’s world has become quantitative, definable and directed that “On a Path Austere and Certain” called me back to a simpler time and slower pace when curiosity and childlike wonder reigned supreme. I witness this in my young grandchildren who are not burdened with excessive expectations. I actually reread the poem periodically to remind myself of what matters.

She cannot recall the moment  
she stopped believing in things un-numbered 
perhaps when she learned to add and subtract 
with pencils and erasers,  
to tell time when clocks had hands 
and she watched them circle like colorful horses on a carousel,   
before numbered highways with their numbered  
exits and on-off ramps could take you anywhere  
deemed a destination 
so long as you followed directions. 

Numbers stole the magic. 
But in her dreams she remembers 
when a marathon was loving someone 
through the unbearable and not 26.2 miles, 
when a scale didn’t tell you how to feel about yourself, 
before grades and percentiles swallowed infinite possibility whole. 
It’s all digital now, it’s on or it’s off, no in-between— 
straight lines, clear markers, global positioning  
setting your course so you are never lost.  

Yet, still she sits on the cool sand by analog oceans, 
watching the sea foam dance like milk bubbles  
when a child blows through a straw, soothed by the lullaby  
of crashing waves rocking the self to sleep 
until high tide comes and, to her relief, 
certainty is gone. 

Diana Fusting enjoys poetry as a vehicle for release, renewal and joy. She is a three-time Special Merit Finalist in the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, Passager, The Loch Raven Review, the Bay to Ocean Journal, the Manor Mill Poetry Collection, and the Humana Obscura Anthology “Blue”. She finds inspiration in both the ordinary and extraordinary of everyday life, recognizing that they are indeed one in the same.