Dolorous and pale-faced
Mountain peaks of barren waste
Create the raging winds that blast
The adamant, eternal past.

Yet here a happy sylph resides
Within the fabric of the sky
Whereat she blows her breath of change
To warm again the mountain range.

The radiant face of the moon so proudly shone
The ragged pall of night was beamed asunder;
Melancholy peals of distant thunder
Sang across the sky they sailed upon.
Receding darkness flowed like ebbing tides
Revealing peaks of snow-clad evergreens
That lent a lonesome beauty to the scene
Portrayed upon the starlit mountainside.
Indeed, the face of the moon so proudly shone
That snow upon the trees did melt and shroud
The lofty mountain peaks with heavy cloud  
Until – the splendour of the scene was gone.

A single crab escapes the ***
Where several would be doomed;
The fate of one becomes the lot -
Boiled and consumed.
They tug and tear each other down
Dividing limb from limb
As each attempt to scramble out
Will pull another in.
But humans are a clever lot
(Though some, we may have doubts)
For when we fall into the ***
We help each other out.

Spineless as a decapod;
The ones who got ahead,
When scrambling up the ladder, trod
Upon another’s head.

A chilling frost descends
Upon the wings of idle butterflies
That sleep amid the grass -

Like sordid memories past.

But glowing dawn ascends
Until the green and gilded meadows rise
With purple flowers too -

The day begins anew.

I want my corpse to fly.
Indeed I wish my wish be known -
Launch my body into orbit
'Til my naked body glows.
May the stars illuminate me
And irradiate my bones
While the solar winds can *******
'Till me rigor mortis goes.
Yes I want my corpse to fly
Where no corpse has ever flown -
To the boundless reach of space;
Into the great and vast unknown.

The rotting flower blooms anew,
Though withering and greyed,
Bewildering the twilight gloom
Where higher forms decayed.
The silent kingdom rises from
The earth where life has left
To bear a fruit by virtue of
The renaissance in death.

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread.
The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.

Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood
In brighter light, and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race, of flowers
Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours.
The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain
Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.

The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago,
And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;
But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sun-flower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.

And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;
When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill,
The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.

And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,
The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side:
In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf,
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief:
Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours,
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.