Traveling (A Sestina)

(image credit)

Imagine if our travels were about

          Our staying more or less in place.

What if it were, instead, the places that

          Came one by one to visit us –

Tectonic shifts of space above the ground

          With sounds of slide and click and lock?

Strange, I suppose, were we resigned to lock

          Our universe to be about

Some antiquated physics on the ground.

          In time it can be commonplace

To see our destinations come to us,

          So we avoid the headaches that

Accompany our travels’ this-and-that.

          The people whom we meet unlock

Their mindsets, too, allowing all of us

          To know what each is all about –

Connecting deeply at a human place

          And hearing heartbeat underground. 

The politics of love, ear to the ground,

          May travel close afoot and that

Ironically may always be in place –

          We know the key to every lock

Can open things we never thought about,

          But also lock the door on us.    

The things that make a place so dear to us

          Stay vibrant as they shift their ground –

Those gardens of Versailles, this roundabout

          That makes a Muscat quaint, and that

Seafood cuisine of Boston such a lock

          On pleasuring the tongue and place.

This shall not be a simulated place

          Nor traveling a case for us

To lie immobilized with cabled lock,

          As in the “Matrix,” where the ground

Is generated by computers that

          Know all there is to know about.

The world shall know and place itself for us,

          Whenever we unlock the ground –

That traveling is what we are about.

Traveling (A Sestina) © Ron Villejo