The fields were bright, then dark, then bright again,

and each day, sunny as the last,
Never did my child mind think
this world was doomed to pass.
The corn would grow, then fall, then grow
but onward would my body go,
and in summers forward, far from then,
my going on became my aging foe.

So thusly forth, I woke, then dreamt, then woke again
into a form unknown, unmeant,
who walked the fields with foreign feet and toes,
strange world without, wrong mind within.
Behind me was the time I lived to know
yet still the corn would grow, then die, then grow,
never living past its golden times
to be – with all its happy years behind.

For I still am, though golden times be gone
and forward, forward, forward, I go on.
Servant to this time I cannot name
is meager Man’s forgotten-often pain.
Perpetuality: my melancholy curse;
these years have come without my dying first.