Where I came from

This is where I came from,
and the place to which I shall come back at the end.
I have been away many times,
and between the setting out and the returning
there are towns, villages that are home to others,
rivers and mountains that are familiar to them,
but all are strange to me.
The people that I meet, good people for the most part,
even those with whom I travel some of my journey,
are not my people, and I am not sad
to part from them.
So I travel on, and each time
my journey brings me to the same place,
and I am happy to know it again.
Sometimes, alone and far away,
I see men and women happy to be where they are,
and notions may come to me in the night
that I too could be happy somewhere else,
that another place could be home.
But with the sunrise, as the mists disappear,
I see those phantoms for what they are,
the ramblings of a lonely soul, fantasies,
imaginations of what might have been.