A traveller’s sketches

The verdant hills and cloudy caravans

Were fellow travellers during my days,

Yet they are gone and so are the lays

We sang in mellow company.

I live behind the shutters of my fears,

The past is an old friend I’ve left behind

And now I say I’m less inclined

To gaze upon the changing world.

I’ve seen the growing cancer and its death,

I’ve felt deep hatred throb within its veins,

I shuddered at the fall of many reigns,

The vain attempts of their ambitious kings.

Men of our world have sealed a lethal fate,

A pact only a demon could contrive,

A final dance of death, a tawdry jive,

The sneering witness of our telltale tears.

I gaze upon the lands I’ve known so well,

What’s new and old I can no longer tell,

We are all proselytes of lustful creeds

That tells us to forsake our heartfelt needs.

So we subdue to blasphemies and lies,

So we forget that vision in our eyes,

The lulling world we live in is unreal,

In our hearts, our hopes we shall conceal.