Arriving at Santiago de Compostela
And, suddenly, without warning,
As if a thousand handmade signs
Hadn’t pointed to thIs exact place
We are here.
We are here,
No longer on the long Road to Santiago.
But breaching her city walls,
Our steps newly furious, our hearts thundering.
We squint from a wide green hilltop
Barely making out the beige-red stones
And cross-topped spires of the Cathedral
Which look like sharpened pencils writing on the sky.
Someone turns on The Proclaimers.
We dance and sing down the hill,
Shouting that we too would walk 500 miles,
Then stopping for selfies by an ugly city sign.
We are restless, excited school children
Racing toward the playground
After being kept inside all winter.
It is exactly this sort of joy.
Bright and beckoning bagpipes
Paint the air in medieval notes.
We empty our pockets into the piper’s hat,
As he blows us the final few feet of the Camino
We pour into the plaza
And stand on the plaque that marks our arrival
Unsure how we feel or why we are crying,
Numb and disoriented yet ablaze with joy.
Suddenly, so suddenly, too suddenly
We are here, at a tomb belonging to a saint
We marvel and gawp at the flying buttresses
That honors him and his god and keeps the sun off both.
It is only here that I realize we were wrong.
This is not the destination.
This is not where we stop.
These are not our final steps at all.
A saint may or may not lie here,
So too the answers we walked The Way to find.
Because these are not the last steps of our pilgrims' journey.
But the first; and every day, the first again.
Cheryl Murfin, at Cathdral Santiago de Compostela
Bravo Cheryl! Well done!!!