Lamentations

The happiness that we did share
a little while ago is gone
away from me and miseries,
unemployment, emptiness
and many other tales of woe,
are the only songs I have to sing
which still bare relevance to life,
whose dying phrases of refrain
seem in recapitulation
of an aeolean anthem
to recall a happy moment,
or sometimes a friendly smile
that seems imagination’s wit
to grasp, with hope to toy a while
and then, in desperation, shrink
away into the depths of night
and leave again a love that’s death
in consternation’s hollow cell.

When I was young I often thought
in foolish dreams of happiness
that seemed to be reality,
whose gentle chords would ease the strain
of present life (as was it then)
and call to me throughout my days
as angels serenading saints
upon the eve of endless night
that is their own eternity.
And yet such happiness I knew
must be so rare that only those
who’re chosen by oblivion,
or some such self promoting force
that seems to rest not in my house,
will be contented by its fare
of everlasting sacraments,
which bring to me unbounded joy
where e’re am able I to grasp
their so elusive blessedness.
And so it was that I did fear
my coming downfall drawing on,
that failure should be all I know.
Hope was but to run away
from life and certain destiny
and winter in my childish dreams
until winds of reality
should blow me onwards to my fate,
with trumpets playing minor chords
that herald doom and tragedy
within the opera’s wizened walls.

All this I told to you at length,
yet did I so in half a word
with metaphors your mind confuse,
that no truth did it comprehend,
but only foolish words of jest,
which from the mouths of babbling wits
and politicians shouting odds
often disregarded clatter.

But still, when all my words are said,
there nothing is that can erase
the dreams I know and love my own;
happiness and hope eternal
and futile thoughts of tender love
that spring and on forever run
from birth till death, though rain and wind,
on which the soul floats buoyantly,
as fallen leaves on mountain streams
go dashing, tumbling over rocks,
drowned by eddies, soaked with spray,
yet onwards still with speed increasing,
driven by eternal clockwork,
downwards, backwards, upwards, sideways,
onward, downward yet again.
Suddenly the spring is broken
and there in dirty backwaters
becalmed, adrift, drowning slowly -
there lies my soul, a sodden mess;
and thus pedantic rites are trivial
until the coming of the day,
which across the countless aeons
reaches out and seems to waiver
with tentacles of passing time
that are so distant and remote -
until the drum beat calls a name
and downward slowly sinks the leaf:
now dead forever is my heart.