The Basic Tenets Poem by David Lewis Paget

The basic tenets of my faith
Remain, though time has blunted all
The finer points I once embraced
By casting doubts beyond my trawl.

For now a sober Saturn sets
Its nets at my small sanity,
While I remain obsessed with things
That ravage this mortality.

Time teases man a little way
Then casts him out, adrift in space
As if his grace were nothing blessed
And all his dignity but waste.

And it is this that most appals
The cultured mind, the man within
Who weaves long patterns through short dreams
That he conceives, but may not spin.

That he conceives, and yet must leave
In ruin at his final breath
While others pick his patterns clean
And tread, like him, his dreams to death.

13 April 1982