I Am Tossed Into A Wretched Life Poem by Gert Strydom

(after John Clare)

I am tossed into a wretched life
where all my friends have forsaken me
and you whom I loved are only found in memory
while senses and sensibility is all at strive

and yet in this nothingness I am still alive,
but from hardship I am never free
and its only darkness that around me I see
but once you were my beloved wife

and now all my aims and esteems
are shattered, broken to pieces,
even our love, our joy and happiness
are swept away like broken dreams
while the darkness, the destruction increases
and people treat me with a kind of aloofness.

[Reference: “I am – yet what I am none cares or knows” by John Clare.]