by Meru S.
In the land where grass grows gold
And gold itself does flourish;
In a city not yet shaken by Earth herself;
In the year of a thousand,
Eight centuries,
Seventy,
And four;
As the month of winds and rains
And of tender blossoms of fire,
Wandered away, unnoticed, with
Only five days left to live,
Was a life begotten.
A life that would piece together words—
Find refuge in words—
Words of joy and woe
And of mystical wonder . . .
To the eye of the reader.
And upon this life was the name of
Robert Lee Frost placed
In admiration, in imitation,
Of an esteemed soul,
A general of the South.
When had passed a pair of years,
Two months,
And one score and ten days,
Another, a sister, entered his life;
Together, they were alike and different.
When five years had grown him into a young boy,
The gentle Isabelle Frost
And the intoxicated William Frost
Sent him to kindergarten halfway across town,
With his trust in the driver of his horse-drawn bus
Who well-nigh failed to locate his passenger’s home,
Plunging the child into a pit of panic.
And he avoided school for many a year,
For his stomach was overcome with pain—
Perhaps fabricated . . .
Perhaps of true existence . . .
But successful, nonetheless.
And so, homeschooled he was,
In the art of numerals and reading,
In the weaving together of words.
And it was the latter that he was drawn to;
Errors in his copying of sentences
Drove him to a state of fury,
To rip the page from its bindings,
And to crush it to demolition.
Then tragedy struck,
Six years thereafter:
The death of his father;
Uprooting the family,
Sending them across the States
On a long, lonely journey aboard a train
To the east,
Where they resided with their kin,
Where his mother found employment
As a teacher of the middle grades.
And it was then and there that he attended school alongside others,
—Unaccompanied by a lack of complaint—
Yet again under the instruction of his mother, the schoolmistress . . .
It was to him all but engrossing;
His mother elected to ignore
The shavings of wood that amassed
Beneath his desk,
Fallen away from wooden figures.
He took no interest in reading,
He read no book until the age of fourteen—
Instead, uncovering a love of nature
That was bound to infuse his verses with its tranquility.
But a necessity to earn wages wrenched aside his attention,
Flinging it towards an undesired position at a shoe factory,
Until he quit from disrelish.
His pursual of further education lit a lamp,
Illuminated the works of the distinguished—
John Keats,
Edgar Allen Poe,
Inspired him to compose those of his own.
And so “La Noche Triste” manifested in his mind,
One night,
And like a river gliding down to form a lake,
It flowed from his mind
Through his pen
To meet his paper in physical appearance,
And he believed that it augured
The poet within him destined to be revealed—
The Monet of imagery,
Who would depict the bittersweet days
After Apple-Picking
With expression as free as the starlings’ flight;
Who would evoke a child to mount the branches of the
Birches,
To bow them with joy,
With exhilaration,
To ride skyward,
Away from the trammels of reality,
And to return once more,
To the earth,
To engagement,
To community and love;
A poem of two fragments combined.
And he took
A path less traveled
To tease his friend not through prose,
But through poetry,
Through stanzas seemingly sapient,
Through essence hidden in plain sight,
And it was not the poet’s wished significance
That was perceived then,
For, instead, it bewildered the recipient,
Who failed to look beyond its profound semblance,
Who primed the canvas for many a perusal to come.
And they have remained—
Sempiternal jewels,
Gold that has lasted,
Untarnished.
The Lighthouse 