I never dreamt I would live so long...

The dream was of the journey South from Camelot
In the springtime morning when we left the citadel;
It was a royal road glistening in white purity
As we put off the fables of our youth to enter the real world.
There is a strident truth in the joys of adolescence
As a horsedrawn sledge coasts over the Northern snow
Bringing the Lord to escort his Lady thru the wintry night;
But now we see the Spring and all is tears and lamentation.

It is a great downcoming to leave behind the two bright eyes
And journey into the world of men where a happy poem
Is as rare as an interrupt in the great crashing waves
Of the sea; as the white horses eternal batter our hopes.
Breeding is the ruin of it. The ills of the parents
Multiply on the children and the weight snaps the mind.
Better never to be loved at all than to know what is missing.
The black horsemen skirt the outskirts of the sane destiny.

To be alone, at one, with the greenwood in the days of infancy
Before the Lady in her ragamuffin clothes inherited the poetry.
To be joined in the embrace of eyes when eating one another
Is insufficient. To realise that the deep, the truly-felt,
Is an occasional event in life; not to be lived from day to day.
To understand that age does not suit a cavalryman
Who would rather be urging his black horsemen onto fresh conquest:
There is a time when the charge stops and it is necessary to ponder.

I never dreamt I would live so long...

   Douglas Clark