Youth and the Tragic View

At the age of thirty I found fewer defensive walls.

Insecticide had killed the locusts But where were the trees? Where was the grass?

One drink was my undoing. When the others at the party Came to ice a drink And said, "What are you doing out here?" I studied the kitchen sink And said I didn't know.

The year that I was thirty All this happened. I called it my time of angst.

Time has blooded my passionate youth, My clean despair. The rebel-view from where I stood Is thick with trees, Full of the locust sound. And as for walls, they loom up everywhere.