The Wind Cares Not
Greatness I was promised,
but in great poverty do I live.
Who offered these false hopes,
this empty life I am to give?
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I’ve bowed to my king
and killed for the crown,
yet here I lay dying
on cold silent ground.
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Which god did I neglect?
Whose temple did I not enter?
Devoted and devout was my life,
as told, with the gods at the center.
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Glory would be my future
if I lived according to the law,
but empty are my pockets,
with no food left to gnaw.
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Happiness would be mine for certain
if I thought as philosophers prescribed.
but here I sit in sorrow,
waiting for Providence to arrive.
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Love would be mine without question,
with a wife and family of three,
but in war and in law and in thought I have been,
so this love has not yet found me.
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I have only my tears left to offer
to the dirt beneath me and in turn,
it asks nothing of me as I lay here,
and promises me none of its concern.
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What are my failures to Nature?
It will go on without me anyway.
“The wind cares not for your troubles,”
I tell myself, and my troubles they all go away.
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I grab the hard dirt beneath me,
and push hard till I’m back on my knees.
“Whose fault were my failures but my own?”
I ask, as I sit amongst the trees.
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These immortal woods and their secrets—
I laugh and say “Gods damn you!”
I had nothing left to worry about,
Nature’s wisdom now shared by two.
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I stand on my feet and remember
the girl who I’ve long dreamt to wed.
My life is my own to live for.
What are pebbles to the flow of a riverbed?
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I walk among the trees and the rivers;
fortune full because I choose it to be.
I seek no crowns, no gods, no glory, no more!
Only her and to be here with me.
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I run towards the coast and the ocean,
telling destiny it no longer has a hold.
No longer will I live for mere nothings,
this is the end of the ways of the old.
-
I stand at the edge of the ocean,
and look to the Sun as it settles.
“This life is my own to live for!” I shout,
“The wind cares not for my troubles.”