The Trees

What years did quietly pass
The youth men praise alas
With tears that would not fall to bless
The shade of depths in loneliness
To skies of hideous loss
Where falling stars of blue did cross
Wild trees shifting without form
In the silence of a nameless storm.

Without cloud or thunder to ride
From whence no soul might hide;
And the willows that sorely wept
Where each star's wish was kept
Drove me poor to my knees
Begging freedom from the trees.

No free lake could bind my soul
And no flower could console ,
For the trees did strike me blind
From the beauty of nature's mind.

Death I saw and death became
The epitaph of what was once my name
In the deep melancholy
Of what the poet's deem most holy.

Each breath a grave--a fate
With so grand a gripping weight
That to my ghost did surely spring
An unwanted lingering
That heard not my desperate pleas
To leave the shadow of the trees.