Five Things You Face When You Go

@Westbridge

Five Things You Face When You Go

Home is the old trick we played on time,

a kitchen full of noise, shoes breeding by the door,

your photographs leaning against one another

like they have been drinking and know a secret.

I cared for these walls, but you made them family.

East is morning, and you are its impossible children,

walking toward a world that has no idea who you are yet.

Let it find out. Let it be surprised.

You were never meant to spend your whole lives

being the people I already know how to love.

South is heat, weather, bad decisions and good stories,

the country where every road eventually charges admission.

You will lose things. You will win things.

You will occasionally confuse the two, as I did,

and discover that growing up is mostly expensive education.

West is where the sun goes down carrying everybody's youth,

and someday you will look back from some city I cannot name

and understand why I always stood a little too long at the door.

It was never because I doubted you could leave.

It was because I knew you would.

North is the hard country, the beautiful unknown,

where your father's advice becomes increasingly theoretical.

So take your courage. Take your stubbornness. Take your ridiculous hope.

Take everything good we managed to give you

and improve upon it, which is the proudest thing you can do for us.

-----

©2026 Christopher Reilley 

 Meeting the Bar for DVerse Poets Pub, and missing my adult daughters.

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