Requiem For My Soul

Requiem For My Soul

O my soul, my lonely soul
I see you walking
With fire encircling your feet
And mist obscuring your face
I feel you yearning
To rise above your days and nights
To breathe the fragrance of a fuller day
I hear you weeping and lamenting
The foulness of the cage
I placed around you

I can hear you calling my soul
I hear you calling to your loftier self
Which dwells beyond time and space
Beyond time and space you would fain wing your flight
O how sorrowful is your face my soul
You no longer smile or laugh with me
Often you leave me
Girded with pain and dreams
To walk upon rainbows and rove with the wind
Singing strange songs I cannot understand

You frighten me my soul
At times I desire to hide my face from you
I know you abhor me and my way of life
I am here clinging to dust
Inhaling the stench of decaying things
Yielding obediently to the tyranny of vain desires
Embracing images which appear at the dawn of fancy
Only to slip away with the shadows of fleeting yesterday
Leaving my tomorrows yoked with painful memories

You walk with me my soul in the ways of men
But secretly you desire the way of gods
When the distant horizon swallows the sun
And darkness engulf our island
The forces of the night lay their hands upon you
And crown you with the diadem of madness
Which to you is bliss and ecstasy
We walk upon the shores of the great sea
You in bliss and ecstasy
I in despair and hopelessness

You reach out my soul
Snatch an atom from the elements
And with the breath of your mouth cleft it asunder
To behold the unfolding of your silent dreams
Which contain your greater dreams
Of loftier days
Proclaimed by past “Day Stars” of glory

You pluck a leaf of cilantro from the earth my soul
Raise it above your head
To release a hummingbird, which takes flight to the skies
But finding no arbour within the boundaries of here and now
Dispirited it returns to your hand
Becoming once again a leaf of cilantro
Which you gently return to the earth.

Like a frolicsome child
You rope the wind for a steed
Traverse the milky way
And realms beyond thought and time
While I sit upon the sinking sand
Filling my lap with pebbles and stones

Cupid bends his bow
Aims his arrow in direction
Lets it fly and pierce our breast
But only I feel the pain

You have your life my soul, I have mine
My life is of the senses
Where passion rules supreme
Every highway leads “beneath the wheel”

I spend my time
Chasing the many faces of pleasurable past times
Which I embrace like cool mist upon my face
But in another instant
Scorch me like searing flames

I am like a hunter
Who shoots a wild boar in the woods
But cannot claim his victim
For a thousand others put him to flight

Your life my soul
Is the way of seeking
It is shrouded with mysteries
Leading to myriad labyrinths of realities
You are not of this contingent world my soul
You are a child of the timeless and the placeless
Trapped within the answers to your own questions
Wrestling with shaded dreams and my mortality

I was born of the earth my soul
To the earth I shall cling till I am no more
You were born of ether and spirit
Within the fold of eternity
Must you walk evermore

I detest my evanescence
But still do not envy your immortality
I shall retreat to sweet oblivion
The trees and the mountains shall laugh
The shrieking of the elements
Shall terrify the faint hearted
But I my soul shall be ….. no more

You my soul
Cannot escape by retreating to oblivion
Alone and unaided must you walk in the dark
Till you emerge to face Eternity’s Sunrise

Life my soul
Conceived you deathless
The day I was born dying
Since we must soon embrace
The inevitable transition
Let us be at peace with each other
Till the hand of life
Shall merge you with the ether
And lay me like a pebble in the heart of the earth

Ken George Dill Date written unknown