LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

Often the poet finds himself" on the lazy grass disconnected from what gives him strength and dreaming that he lives in another age.

He wanders around the court of a great castle and is pushed along the wall by people in from the festival, half-drunk, wild for sex, carrying goods. He seeks out the priest who condemns him for his emancipated imagination and demands that his vapid songs be in praise of the strong-willed images of the Church. The poet upbraids the priest and tells him that in the bowels of the castle are men who have ideas about nature that will make the priest obscure and powerless. For a moment the priest assumes the look of a madman startled by the child's truth and then laughs in scorn. "We know about those men- they are our brothers." . .. ^

When he wakes the broken conduit to to his spirit lays in front of him, by the tire of fast moving automobiles. It is as if his spirit were attempting to pull itself up and into one of the automobiles so it can fly free of the poets ugly body.