On starry nights like this one, speech comes easy,
and little separates the sorely crafted
from last night’s efforts, tickled from a breezy
thought, scribbled down and hardly once redrafted.
Who was the famous poet who once said,
‘Tread softly, for you tread upon my dreams?’
He said it better than I could. The dead
are more alive than we who live, it seems.
In any case, if his dreams were so fine,
why did he leave them lying on the ground,
insisting that I do the same with mine,
which to their dreamer are more tightly bound?
Until I learn to dream more carelessly,
those who tread here must also tread on me.
***
When I was young, I used to dream of being
sentenced to live a hundred years alone
in a stopped world, and happily obeying,
scavenging food from shops, watching the sun
rise every morning over empty streets,
cycling from one library to the next,
with no one there to spoil the delights
of solitude, and all my problems fixed,
my graceless fumblings with politeness done.
But there are days when an exhausted yearning
that can only be loneliness sets in,
when I am glad I understand the meaning
of friendship, and I stop, and wonder whether
some friends might spend their solitudes together.
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***
Though I may strive for greatness, well I know
that greatnesses far greater than my own
will crumble as the decades come and go,
for greatness perseveres by grace alone.
When time has rusted all our wealth away
and silenced our inconsequential chatter,
when all the little games we used to play
are long forgotten, only grace will matter.
Let me not ask for riches, nor for fame,
nor for the strength to rise above my friends.
Grant me no victories; let there be no shame
in failure, on which so much grace depends.
Teach me to take the bitter with the sweet
so that I may be gracious in defeat.
Samuel Williams was born at least a hundred years too late to be a poet. He writes fiction instead, some of which has appeared in Voiceworks magazine and dB magazine. He is currently waist-deep in a Creative Writing Honours thesis at Flinders University, and also works part time at Mostly Books, where he facilitates a young writers’ group for criminally talented ten-to-fourteen-year-olds. http://samuelwilliams.com.au
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