The Butler Pennsylvania Poems


To a Despondent  Boy  

Has anyone ever told you
a time is coming when,
without your doing,
something great will happen to you?
A wake-up experience,
that will shake you                           
to the depths of your being.

Know that it is coming,
so that when it does
you will not run away.

Do not be afraid.
It will all happen
before you realize
what it is.
But once it does
you will be someone new.

You will find yourself in a wild storm,
you will be battered and born aloft,
you will lose all orientation and
be set out on a path
you never knew existed.
The life you had lived
will be overturned,
and you will look out and find
a new world.

You will discover
forces
within yourself
that you knew nothing of.
Forces stronger than you,
forces you must learn to harness,
lest they run away with you.

You will taste rapture
and feel an unknown strength
from out of your heart.
It will frighten you.
You will try to rid yourself of it,
but you will
not be able to,
for it will have become part of you.

A fire will be enkindled
from which there is no escape.
A devastating fire
that will lay waste to your past.
You will be confronted with
a fascinating, strange newness
and will slowly learn how
to live with it.

You will be greatly amazed
at you own potential.
You will be led to understand
the meaning of things,
to experience fullness and fruition.
You will become creative.
You will not know where to go
to find peace or hide away
with your ecstatic,
overflowing happiness.
You will be living
in a changed, new world.

And when you are old
you will look back on what happened then,
always with amazement and wonder,
still not knowing
what it was,
but you will ever gravitate back
to that ecstatic event of your life.


Charles L. Cingolani           Copyright © 2020