"The Road Not Taken", by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), imagines a fugitive from enslavement deciding which road to take to freedom. The yellow birch forest he is passing through in autumn sheds its leaves on both possible routes and renders them indistinguishable from each other. The leaves may not have been "trodden black" by other fugitives, but its "undergrowth" figures the Underground Railroad helping him on his journey. His doubt if he "should ever come back" is also hope: that he will escape, or that, if captured, he will escape again. Whatever happens, this moment of choice will become a story to tell in the future—of escape, or of re-enslavement. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 April 2026; an example of Jorge Luis Borges's "erroneous attribution", this interpretation was inspired by a passage in Toni Morrison's 1992 novel "Jazz")