Come Away With Me

Come away with me— let us ride
far from this withered, cold countryside
upon our fleet-flown phantom steeds
unknown among all earthy breeds
with flowing manes of tidal froth
and hide as soft as pillow cloth
and come away on floating hoofs
over moors and valleys and roofs,
and let us journey on, yonder,
from the mundane to so wander
where the mists of dreams may dawn—
to the isle of lost Avalon.
Away we go, to farthest shore
that borders truth and love and lore;
where a moonlit wave never breaks
except for when a dreamer wakes
to rub the sand from groggy eyes
and dispel dreams with woeful sighs,
but not us, oh not so, not we
as we gallop most silently
over a coast of broken glass
where all the hourglasses amass
and spill in vain their futile sand
on the coast of that timeless land
known and unknown as Never-Not
where still there stands grand Camelot
as a dream within a glass globe
beneath a wizard’s twilit robe,
protected, apart, kept away
from the forces that rust and fray;
a refuge where when we are old
we may yet live in youthful mold
as children in Spring’s fresh ascent
without wondering where youth went;
when spine was not so crooked yet
and mind did not so soon forget,
but kept its joys and loves and sense
like a flower its fresh fragrance,
and eyes could see as keen the hawk
and heart leapt at each other’s talk,
whereas now we wilt, growing frail
with later years that wound and ail,
waking life but nightmare itself
conjured by Time, that witchy elf
who delights in dissolving lives
in her cauldron, which naught survives,
so let us go where Merlin waits:
that Isle of Apples, lest the Fates
destine us for mortal sorrows
that take all our hopeful morrows.