Daedalian Ponderings
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Nothing in the world is harder than to strike a balance
Among the all-too-vulnerable scions of good and evil
To plumb the unknown depths of both hatred and love
To wield peace as a weapon and to conciliate with war
To travel the line between reality and the world of dreams
To surrender all to life, yet forever seek to conquer death.

All our mortal lives are but a perilous flirtation with death
Between the shroud and the daylight lies an elusive balance
The promise of an eternity, untroubled by darkened dreams
Which now are tainted by the terror of death and shades of evil,
Or those black compulsions against which we forever wage war
Till at last we perish, only to realize it is the struggle we love

The elemental struggle that consumes our lives: seeking love
Amid a world full of hate, fearing and yet yearning for death,
Pursuing a tranquil life only to attain it through making war.
Where in all these lifelong battles can one find the balance?
Is it impossible to search for goodness without spreading evil?
Perhaps not, but only in the gentle irrationality of our dreams

So in our bitter hearts, still we never lose the child who dreams
Of a perfect world, full of the sound of life and melody of love,
When we seek to escape this earthly realm of mundane evil
And then realize there is no escape available, but only death,
Until someday there will come one who knows how to balance
Both light and darkness, and thus ends our eternal inner war.

Within all of us lies the capacity for both peace and war,
As we reach out to part the veils of our waking dreams
That whisper of the hidden secret of finding that balance
Between the volatile elements that rage and weep and love
In our unpredictable hearts, fighting each other to the death.
But can we find it? Or are we condemned to pure good or evil?

For none should devote their hearts to but one ideal, whether the evil
Of the darkest West or the blazing light of the East, forever at war
With each other, filling the world with purposeless tragedy and death
Unaware that they must subsist only on the wisps of dying dreams
Their zeal sapping away all capacity to feel and understand and love
And the rest of us left to find between their opposing causes our
balance

Perhaps the choice is either inner death, or resorting to wistful dreams
Of a world without such polemic war--but perhaps the peace we love
Is in itself both good and evil, and needs both, to achieve the final
balance.

Penned by my hand on the 14th of Sarapin, in the year 389 AF.