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Eton Langford Poem
THE DAYS of youth have hurried past,
And even friendships hardly last.
Before too long, I’ll drift away
From what I was, and never stay.
A year, a decade, even more
Will overthrow what stood before
And, unbeknownst, I’ll come to find
That all dear things are far behind.
I’ve walked through life and seen anew
That constancies are far and few,
That all belovèd ones must go,
And that all life must ebb and flow.
Until the very end I’ll see
Young flowers in the fields that be,
And I will know that their own fate
Will turn around before too late.
I will admire their gentle shine
And then recall when I had mine,
When my own star was in the sky
And on my strength I could rely.
And then I shall walk by and smile
To know that what makes life worthwhile
Is not what anchors me to stay,
But rather days which fly away.
Find my poems and published poetry volumes at www.eton-langford.com
Copyright © Eton Langford | Year Posted 2016
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Eton Langford Poem
Times of youth and days of old!
Resurrect you if I could,
Never would I need to brood
On my errors in the cold!
Mournful longings of the past
Fed by waning hope for light!
Quickly melt you if I might,
Greener thoughts could grow at last!
Troubled hours of years to come!
Never shall I fall again
Prey to your pale worries when
Love is dead and joy is mum!
My short days shall all be gone
Long before the world is gray:
I must bask without delay
In the bright rays of the sun!
Never should a man relent
To the tempests of the heart.
Do not wait ‘til woes depart
For, by then, all life is spent!
Find my poems and published poetry volumes at www.eton-langford.com
Copyright © Eton Langford | Year Posted 2016
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Eton Langford Poem
Vestiges, ruins unchanged by the season,
Castles on mountains and fortresses linger.
Bleak is the night for the traveling stranger
Dragging his feet, a gold ring on his finger,
Battling the rain and consumed by his reason.
Years have elapsed since his mournful departure;
Family, friendships were left at the manor.
Bloody and restless was life under Ares,
Toiling and fighting the terrible banner
Held by a king with the skills of the archer.
Winds and the tempest subside into drizzle;
Sages and Druids convene by the fire,
Ponder the future and wait for the victor,
Weighing the sense of the gods’ firm desire,
Waiting for chatter and clamor to fizzle.
Gates open wide and the villagers gather:
Home has arrived the unfortunate fighter.
Children come forth with his wife, who is crying;
Gentler his fate should have been, and much lighter.
Cruel are the gods and implacable, rather!
Find my poems and published poetry volumes at www.eton-langford.com
Copyright © Eton Langford | Year Posted 2016
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Eton Langford Poem
The tender, torpid sun floats bored and heavy over vines
And casts his gentle, crimson rays upon the Apennines.
Above the calm and golden hill, Agrippa’s villa stands:
A marble mansion reigning firm atop the ripened lands.
The day is old; the evening star awakes its tender spark
To guide the laborers’ return from toil before the dark.
Before the peaceful manor’s lush and ivied colonnade,
Two soft, enamored voices hide and whisper in the shade:
“O, wretchedness! We are so far from our Brittonic home!
What good is Rome’s dull paradise if freely we can’t roam?!
Though our great master’s generous and shelters us from sweat,
Our dormant woods of Albion are fair and greener yet!”
“Along the rill we’d walk each night to watch its grace unfold,
Until by shackles we were seized and then to Cæsar sold.
Farewell, sweet home, your pristine shores we’ll never see again,
Nor hear the light and gleeful song of the belovèd wren!”
“Our peaceful isle’s been conquered too and promptly overrun
By clouds of war which overthrew the power of the sun.
Forever shall our humble land be bound to foreign whim;
Too hopeless is her future now, forlorn and surely dim!”
“Do not despair, my love,” replied at once the other voice,
“Though we do not, in distant days, our people shall rejoice!
Once Rome grows old, her force shall wane and our descendants’ tongue
Will grow deep roots on all the globe and own it before long.”
“Our bold successors will awake and, with a mighty strike,
Will seize yet undiscovered lands and own them all alike.
Their workings and their industry will spread their wondrous wings
‘Til even Clio’s harp pays heed, and these great exploits sings.”
“Though now unfavored and dismissed on Caesar’s kingdom’s fringe,
One day, on our fair Albion the world’s full fate shall hinge.
The choicest treasures of the past in there will find abode,
And to the greatest minds and bards she’ll be sweet mother lode.”
“Her kings and queens shall rule their realm in an unbroken line
And make our island’s fame unmatched: both splendid and divine.
How ancient will our world then be, and surely long extinct,
Although, by then, the universe will have but barely blinked!”
“And yet, what pride and joy it is to know that our own kin
Shall be the heirs of the sun’s grace, like planets as they spin!
Most fortunate we are, indeed, to know that humankind
A future nobler than our own on Earth shall never find!”
Find my poems and published poetry volumes at www.eton-langford.com
Copyright © Eton Langford | Year Posted 2016
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Eton Langford Poem
Spread forth your wings and fly, fair youth!
Though time is terse and winds are strong,
No brisker bird can glide as smooth.
Fly out and roam, your day’s not long!
Old age will come, so soar in song!
Break free of chains—the time is right—
And do not waste your gift for wrong:
Dive forth and chase away the night!
All spite shall burn, red skies alight,
For naught can stop the glow of truth!
The world’s old ways will die in flight,
For who can stop the charge of youth?
Find my poems and published poetry volumes at www.eton-langford.com
Copyright © Eton Langford | Year Posted 2016
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Eton Langford Poem
Away from the city, away from the world,
On top of the mountain which sleeps in the cold,
A humble astronomer stares at a star.
How lonesome our planet must seem from afar!
He ponders the spaces of wearisome void,
Celestial empires unknown or destroyed,
Continuous mingling of matter and light.
What frightening pageant for man’s feeble sight!
The whirl of the spheres, the clash of the orbs,
Our universe dictates and calmly absorbs
With eons to spare and inscrutable plan.
How weak and unfit is the power of man!
Find my poems and published poetry volumes at www.eton-langford.com
Copyright © Eton Langford | Year Posted 2016
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Eton Langford Poem
I make haste to the earth
And anoint its rebirth
When my mother, the cloud, is above,
And then mildly caress
The irradiant dress
Of the hills with immaculate love.
I descend upon leas
And respond to their pleas
When they pine for my kiss in their thirst;
Then I nourish with ease,
As they flow to the seas,
All the rivers whose growth I have nursed.
I protect, as I fly,
Bashful lovers who lie
Undisturbed in their secretive nests,
While the world is at bay
And far out of their way
On its tiresome, oblivious quests.
When the spring air is dry,
I breathe out with a sigh
And the flowers all bloom at my will
And, when autumn is near,
I shed many a tear
O’er the moors while the granaries fill.
Inconsolable birds
Voice their songs without words
In their fond expectation of me,
And then play in the sun
Once their hearts I have won
With the gift of how warm I can be.
I roam, wave upon wave,
When the mariners crave
The sweet taste of moist myrrh on their lips;
Then I plunge and dissolve,
Rise anew and evolve
Into fog which embraces their ships.
From high crests I oft wend
And with care do I tend
To the needs of all green’ry on earth,
Whom I raise from the ground
In a medley unbound
With tall giants of singular girth.
Over mountains I creep,
Upon castles I weep
As they slowly concede to decay;
Then I cover in moss
All that crumbles to loss
When men die and may not have their say.
Once my tears are all gone,
I give way to the sun
And my brilliant sprays overshine
All that flashes on high
And bewitches the eye
On a bow decked in splendor divine.
Though in change I am donned,
I’m the bridge and the bond
Between heaven and earth in their strife;
I am shy yet sublime,
Unaffected by time,
As refulgent in death as in life.
Find my poems and published poetry volumes at www.eton-langford.com
Copyright © Eton Langford | Year Posted 2016
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Eton Langford Poem
[Continued from Part 1]
“And the efforts of the Senate to extinguish all this fury
Were frustrated by convictions that their god would promptly hurry
To reward and praise the burning of the books in Caesar’s hall:
Pliny, Tacitus and Thallus, and to rescue from the Fall—”
“Man, who, to their minds, with weakness and with infamy is covered,
And who cannot live in honor unless by this faith recovered.
Who are they to claim such knowledge, to proclaim us in the dark,
When their theory of Nature is that all came from an Ark?!”
“Odes to Bacchus might be pointless if the gods did not exist,
But by what right do they reckon that we too are lost in mist?
As to man, by what concoction fabricated in the East
Do they claim the noblest creature to be little more than beast?”
“Where, in man, they see a squalid, unrequited, dismal creature,
I see beauty and much noble to admire in every feature.
They see tragedy and error, unrestraint, reasons for shame;
I see Venus and Apollo, Hercules and nothing lame.”
“They maintain that their religion by their Providence emerged,
That by Christus their dominion over the Empire has surged,
When I know—as well as any who our history has seen—
That by cunning, fraud and scheming all our power wrought has been.”
“And when I, of all the people in the Senate, singly durst
Ridicule their machinations and attack, and be the first
To tell Caesar in plain language before all the Roman world
That our handsome Roman eagle was as good as dead and cold—”
“If our homeland and our temples were prostrated before fools,
I was met with shouts of anger and then banished from the schools
Of great learning—where for decades I had been among the teachers—
By a hoard of angry peasants, of archbishops and of preachers.”
“With feigned meekness and forgiveness or with pity condescending,
I was exiled here on Patmos, where perchance I might find mending
For my sins through deep reflection and by holy intermission
Of their saints: those sordid creatures who had lost their full cognition,”
“And, especially, above them, by that man with wicked lips
Who in caves upon this island had composed th’ Apocalypse.
But no matter... It is written: ‘One weak man against the age
Is a galley in the tempest, a faint scribble on a page.’ ”
[Continued in Part 3]
Find my poems and published poetry volumes at www.eton-langford.com
Copyright © Eton Langford | Year Posted 2016
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Eton Langford Poem
A pendulum is but a slave of time:
What its trapped spirit wants is hidden where
The folding waves can find a friendly clime,
Far from the bloody dagger of despair.
Inveigled by amorphous accolades
Of lust, the lure to scry and linger thin
In search of faithful memories soon fades
If hungry eyes ensorcel beauty’s twin.
Æolian caresses cannot calm
The mind of Argus on his callous charge,
Though knavish gods have chosen to embalm
His eyes within a noble avian barge.
How brazen! I still crave the fleeting thrill
To break the sundial as Saint Elmo strikes the mast
Of ships, and make gray time stand still.
O, might it die so that I breathe at last!
Find my poems and published poetry volumes at www.eton-langford.com
Copyright © Eton Langford | Year Posted 2016
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Eton Langford Poem
The cool ocean breeze,
On nights warm as these,
Is blowing with ease
As we sail the seas.
The moon and the tide
Have nothing to hide,
And bravely we ride
With stars as our guide.
We cruise over green
Dominions marine,
Indulging unseen,
Unheard and serene.
On ripples of bliss,
We roll as we kiss.
Lo, friend, never miss
A journey like this!
Find my poems and published poetry volumes at www.eton-langford.com
Copyright © Eton Langford | Year Posted 2016
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