[Traveler, your footprints]

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 on the sea.

Antonio Machado (Spain, 1875-1939), translation by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney, source Poetry Foundation

[Traveler, your footprints] is published in There Is No Road, 2003, White Pine Press