Transcience

Transience


What words of glass have forsaken these
Which have no intent but to tease
For deceitful rhymes have beguiling ways
And have sealed these eyes over with a glaze
These trapp’d tongues can no longer transgress
So they hang in languid desperation
Parched from knowledge longing to express
But mind cannot speak what ghost could guess

O trifling songs without queried disposition
Give these conflicting words distraction
May abundant life lead this mind to compliance
Into Hippocrene’s pool of oblivion and silence
Lest a world full of barren leaves afflicts the eye
Believing life cannot sustain when words die
As a blackbird cannot sing unless it be free
The mind is lost when reality loses gravity

Infinite seasons of transient happiness
Cannot cover all in a mask of countenance
When this ravaged youth of disquiet cannot see
The mind’s truth is bound in dangerous constancy
Songs of the mind expressed cannot moderate the senses
And this light forgoes truth and remains unruly as
Neither spring nor winter breaks Aoide’s song of glass
As in a comatose state a forgotten soul is left for time to pass



Sarah Solomon