IN THE DARK ‘Gazing at my grief-dejected face, Philosophy Deplored my chaotic mind’ DE CONS. I.I.14 Just look at him! his mind has sunk deep down, Has lost its inner light, become so dull; It reaches out towards external darkness Each time a toxic wave of worry swells Into a tsunami, launched by worldly gales. This was the man who loved the open heavens And journeyed down the trackways of the skies. He’d study rose-red suns and icy moons And calculate the planets’ sinuous paths, Subjecting them to mathematic laws. This was the man devoted to enquiring Why roaring hurricanes assault the sea What spirit turns the sphere of the fixed stars And why the sun climbs from the smouldering east Then drops beneath the waters of the west; And what ensures the gentle days of spring Become so temperate that rosebuds pop And multiply their beauty through the land; And who at harvest when the time is ripe Endows the autumn with its swollen grapes. Revealing nature’s secrets was his life. But he lies there, light of reason dead. His neck’s encumbered by such heavy chains His head is forced to loll towards the ground To contemplate the uninspiring mud.
THE CREEKSIDE HERMIT 