LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

An inner calvacade of rebellion sends the poet from the comforts of home to the mountains. They promise to swallow the poet and his insignificance in long, gray valleys filled with darting panthers. Do not mountains open themselves to the secret chants of subdued thoughts? Vital actions find the message to the sleepless poet who listens to ghosts and animals at night.

Previously, he had indulged himself for one complete day. "Nothing but game playing," he thought. There came a recovery of childhood, a kind of happy regression which did nothing more than inspire the imagintation that fought through the guilt over not accomplishing anything. He recollected. "Thank god for intelligence," he would think wistfully, in autumn afternoons, "thank god, I'm not an intellectual."

He had been through a period of depressing judgments; facile judgement, even supersitious judgements that lacked anything approcahing understanding or appreciation.

"All their dependence on material things is based on terror."

A future imagined is a source of life; there are the spectral variations that haunt the poet days after he leaves the mountain.

Wonderful things wait for the people!

Shame is a silent transformer.