This poem can be found in the last instalment of the excellant Dragonlance Chronicles Trilogy, Dragons of Spring Dawning. I thought it captured the mood of the gentle kender, Tasslehoff Burfoot, intimately after the death of his dear companion Flint Fireforge the dwarf. The book was published in 1985 but I still enjoy revisiting the make-belief world of Krynn after all these years, sharing the protagonists' despairing struggle with their inner selves and coming to terms with their own un-Ramboesque mortality. Like all good things, the Dragonlance series has been cynically exploited and milked dry by the syndicate. It seems few people ever know how to bow out gracefully when their time is up; a theme you'd learn by reading the chronicles.

Always before, the spring returned.
The bright world in its cycle spun
In air and flowers, grass and fern,
Assured and cradled by the sun.

Always before, you could explain
The turning darkness of the earth,
And how that dark embraced the rain,
And gave the ferns and flowers birth.

Already I forgot those things,
And how a vein of gold survives
The mining of a thousand springs,
The seasons of a thousand lives.

Now winter is my memory,
Now autuum, now the summer light---
So every spring from now will be
Another season into night.