A Poem from High School

As I was looking through some old books and papers at home, I found this sometimes awkward, sometimes interesting poem (a bit like anyone's teenage years):


I loved before the mountains loved.
My heart was pierced by Indian's arrows
Scores before your grace shot down from the sky.
Darkness lives wherefrom I have come;
Into darkness will I soon return.

What light, this life, and all its worth!
What beauty in the leaving and in death.
What whispers between all things living;
What cascading fountains of regret.

I do not know if I will make it
Past this day or through the night.
The sun in the trees,
hiding thick in the trees,
peeking out of the trees,
Fools my twisted heart,
and my bark brittles and breaks.

And for those who knew me in those distant halls of past lives,
Might you harbor love that, ago, didn't seem?
Send it to heaven in freedom and light,
Throw your hands to a purple light in the sky.

As if by twisting hurricanes,
As if by grinning reapers standing still in Kansas twilight,
As if by lonesome herders peering out across their land,
I turn my self-torn body around, and slowly make for home.

We were the land's before the land knew we were living,
And our monuments to no one created our gods,
In a moment they were flung from a shrug of god's shoulders,
and they danced on their light down to earth.

What more today can be done?
How can I save this all?
Is it worthless, to try, to care, or,
to give all that I'll soon have lost?

By looking up and making sure that witches don't appear,
You'll be all right, and your dogs are fine in their kennel on the moon.
But if you see a broom flash above your head, and you don't have a house to run to,
Run right up to me, and you're now company, and you will save my life,
And we'll both be all right, and we'll shoot off for the sun in a day's time.
And we'll pass through the universe in an hour.  To home.