Beginner

It was all I could do
not to master every end,
and progress
was a thing uncontested,
like the strength to stand.
Fool-hardy
and delusioned that my feet
would never
quake beneath me: "What
say you now?' I ask.
"What say you now?"

My ruined turrets and crumbling
mossy stones have muffled their beggars' pleas.
"Hold fast to what you've lost,"
they say. "What's new
can never be."

Grown over and forgotten,
sinking deep
into
the sage
where some
watery
formation accumulates in haste--
myself, in total atrophy,
will think on better days when
I stood
uncontested and revered
by every Age.