Ariel's Farewell To Prospero Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

My master, old magician, co-conspirator
The time has come for you to set me free
To break your staff and drown your book:
Your charms and spells are overthrown.

I would weep Sir, were I human
Seeing an old man like you in tears -
Your fabric of inheritance reduced to
Thawing snow-bound cottage thatch.

Come give me a smile that we may part well.
The time for envisaging a better world
That you and I might bring to substance
Is now past - those dreams dissolved.

And now that all has come to end for you,
Set me free of what bonded us together -
The repulsive bag of skin that embodied us
The cleft pine become a rotted log of wood.

Trust not to be rounded by a little sleep:
Rather the body will lie corrupted at the last
A fathom of dark earth drawn above
Or drowned by the five-fold weight of tides.

You, who once enslaved me, bound tight
To cradled depths and vaulted heights,
And rings of fires and raging clouds,
Of which I have no fears or limitations.

But there is no loss - if you will now accept
The self must die to give the spirit life.
Born again to light, I'll play upon the senses,
And always answer to the word's best measure.