On My Eighteenth Year

On this dim dawn, my eighteenth year is born.
The night is ice, the stars are absent here.
A surging flood of thought is born from fear.
From past to fate I think, and I am torn:
Are my rhymes feeble, drawing only scorn
From passers knowing I am never clear?
What of myself? I stand on this frontier
Of melancholy, sadness, hopes forlorn.
No gleaming star gives hope to my estate
As I look to the bleak and endless night.
I cannot draw my dreams from distant eyes,
Nor turn from passioned feelings or their weight.
Ill-fated hopes will always blur my sight.
No answers fall from out the darkling skies.

When There is Silence

When there is silence looming on the air,
When words are vague reminders of our time,
When you seem as a ghost of fading care,
I turn to woe, to sadness, and to rhyme.
I cannot say what drives me to this verge;
Conflicting sorrows crush my timid hope.
Aspiring dreams do naught to quell or purge
My fears of discontentment on this slope
Of living tears. Or do I think with haste,
Act without sense, to judge what is not clear?
What is the truth? My mind has surely raced
And drowned, by rashness, reason with my fear.
But now I wait, and hope, on your reply;
That my affections still might live, not die.