Elia Michael Poems

This work is just for me and only me
It is for no one else's eyes but mine
Thus I, in this, can be totally free
I can select from any form, design.
...

Reason, the best of all the gifts we own
Human? They say this trait is only ours
Yet I have seen that we are not alone
It's also one of animals' powers
...

From time to time I look on them and think
What are these poems, are they any good?
They are my offspring written down in ink,
I hope when read they're not misunderstood.
...

When I was young I thought I knew it all,
But now I'm not so young as I once was
And now I know I do not know it all.
Because I do not know it all, I pause
...

The nights are getting cold
The days are getting short
And summer's balmy gold
Is merely now a thought
...

It is so hard to write, at times so hard.
I've started lots of poems, but left them,
Yet I'm afraid to completely discard
These works, unfinished poems, to condemn
...

I dreamt a dreamy kind of dream, where I
Was in that place they call Elysion
A paradise on earth beneath a sky
That stretched like a blue-domed pavilion
...

I found a piece of paper old and torn,
It had a date of eighteen fifty-one,
A hundred years before I had been born,
Thus written by a man who was long gone.
...

I do not know what fate it is to be,
Nor do I know what day or hour will see
The end of life, by that I mean my life.
Though this speculation of mine is rife,
...

I sigh a holy sigh of thanks to Him
As I am lying here awaiting death,
A faint respiratory kind of hymn
With laboured, rasping, dying sort of breath.
...