Author's Note: I was looking through some old notebooks last
night and came across this poem I wrote when I was 15.
Frodo, Mordor, the river, the Ring, the West, well pretty much everything here belongs to the wonderful J.R.R. Tolkien, not me.
I sit on the bank of the wild-flowing river,
Surrounded by beauty of nature untold.
I look to the mountains with heart growing heavy,
For I must fulfill the legends of old.
The brook seems to laugh, my fate unregarded;
The ocean, to carelessly toss it away;
The brook is too small to understand heartache;
And do the lake's placid waters comfort me? Nay.
But the river gives sympathy all of its own,
As I wait for the dawn of a brown, dawnless day.
In the West, battles rage without hope, without end;
And I, in my fate, must steady their sway.
I shall follow the river into the Dark Land,
Content that my fate is sealed with my doom,
Holding fast to the thought that I may yet survive:
Into the Dark Land, where the shadows loom.
6/27/90