May You Never Know Poem by Diana Rosser

May you never know sorrows such as these
stifling grey clouds of wretchedness that seep
through strangling vines that flourish in their deep
dark dankness. Cold fingers that wind and squeeze
crushing and bending until your stout knees
buckle. Neither wept pray nor drugged sleep
stops their insidious dampness from creep-
-ing inside last hopes that flicker and tease.
How to endure a mountain such as this,
where even tenacious boots cannot grip
and each way forward is a backward slip?
It offers no hiding place or state of bliss
to starve the bleakness of this final trip.
Salvation lies only in deaths sweet kiss.