If oft I turn toward the skies
To sort out what’s inside
Will I be free from others’ lies
And see the truths they hide?
If oft I turn toward the skies
To sort out what’s inside
Will I be free from others’ lies
And see the truths they hide?
I wandered out amid the mists
And dreary village lights
And there lost sight of twinkling lamps
That lit my prior nights
A punishing, fast heat of words
Runs through the sweating crowd
As fell disquiet undergirds
The things uttered aloud
I walked out on the sunburnt ground
And whispered to the breeze
Asked why it hadn’t come around
Brought scents from distant seas
It told me there was trouble out
Upon some distant shore
One I had seldom heard about
Nor cared very much for
And so the wind did leave me there
To blow in far-off lands
And careless I stand in this air
Unseeing of the blood upon my hands
The moment that you walked beyond
The limits of my sight
Even as our unearthly bond
Blazed in my heart as light
I wept for that you were not near
No longer in my reach;
Unbidden rose that boundless fear
Upon my hopes, a leech
Yet still the light shines in my soul
Unseeing do I see
And know that soon my heart’s deep hole
Will fill again with thee
I sigh a bit and die a bit
Each time I walk that road
To tread upon an unloved yon
Does my soul thus erode
I dreamt I walked upon a lake
Whose surface was like glass
And there the water to me spake
Through my mind’s deep morass
‘Look here, beneath your toes,’ it said,
‘And wonder at what’s there
‘For you opted to make your bed
‘Away from cleaner air.’
And there beneath the surface I
Could see the rippled sand
And fishes who were wending by
So far from tempered land
And so I turned my skin to scales
And stepped beneath the waves
And there I found aboveground pales
‘Gainst water’s weird enclaves
The babbling brook that runs along
The road that I call home
Does often sing a quiet song
When it thinks it’s alone
It sings of saplings growing there
Upon the river’s bank
So too it sings of cleaner air
Before the land so stank
And though it flows out to the sea
And passes much that way
First it laments of ‘now’ to me:
The dirt that is today
The forest waits for no man as
Ever it grows and grows
And yet beneath its boughs there is
Unchanging character
Were I to wake some clouded day
And speak unto the sun
Would it come forward at my call?
Would morn’s grey be undone?