Rhyme Royal: Compostela

Compostela

When I was but a boy of nineteen years
My heart was filled with blood near boiling hot
And courage that could master any fear
That drove me into action without thought.
But with such heedless coin can sin be bought,
And when I drew my blade in anger’s name
My hands were shackled down with chains of blame.

What quarrel stoked the fire I cannot say,
Nor who struck first when our two blades were crossed.
I only know that I saw fit to slay
A stranger whose life needn’t have been lost.
As eye for eye, so my life his should cost,
But undeservèd mercy shone on me
And so instead I journeyed to the sea.

The bishop charged me with the sin of wrath
But thought that my black heart could be made whole.
He set me onto Santiago’s path
With distant Compostela as my goal.
I prayed that I could heal my broken soul
By journeying long miles through distant lands
With nothing but a pilgrim’s staff in hand.

I traded silken doublets for rough wool,
My jeweled girdles shed for hempen twine.
A pilgrim’s meal would never make me full,
And nighttime found me bedded down with swine.
I moaned about the fate that now was mine
And cursed the man who drove me to the rage
That locked me in my penitential cage.

A day, a week, a month upon the road
In neverending exile each had passed,
Yet as with fellow travelers I strode
Each dawn was somehow brighter than the last.
Our pace was neither too slow nor too fast
And as we walked I learned the pilgrims’ songs
That slowly made me feel I might belong.

Through France we went, and so to Aragon,
Along the road that thousands walked before
And thence into Castile we journeyed on
To where we sought redemption, nothing more.
I heard the mass and felt my heart restored;
I touched the pillar with a trembling hand
And found myself a newly minted man.

In time I made my way back whence I came,
A fledgeling bird flown back into the nest,
Grown to a man now worthy of the name.
No longer with a fire deep in his breast,
But rather by a calmer light now blessed.
Once God forgave me for my mortal sin
I found a new life waiting to begin.

A poem written in rhyme royal, November 2010.

Updated: February 27, 2013 — 9:53 am