A Tribute to Her (poem)

Where and what would I be today,
Without her, her vision, her way?
She was the light for my inn’r cave.
I was a man, but high-browed knave.
For are we not all knaves in fact,
When as imbeciles, we do act
With no thought of thought in accord
With bare truth or Sir Occam’s sword?
She bravely did what I would not.
She, who untied Gordian’s knot,
Gave breadth to the eternal mind,
Breath and sight to formerly blind.
It was she who stared life in eye.
She, it was, who nodded with “aye.”
She birth’d human like no other,
Though never, herself, birth mother.
In her is found emotions’ flight
With brother brain as guiding sight.
What she did, I could ‘lone have done.
In youth, my tools already won,
I had ears, eyes and mind, for sure,
But ‘lacrity for conjurer.
I made sense of father’d nonsense.
Past evasion dogg’d future tense.
I proclaimed things where things were not.
Low injustice won silent lot.
I worked hard, yes, but not for me.
“I” lost wars to part-purchased “we.”
And so it went, days of turmoil,
My head in air, no feet on soil,
‘Til one morn, atop stack of books,
Lay friend’s gift, novel, not of crooks.
Dust stood thick on jacket cover,
He’d said, “Read it. You will love her.”
But he talked too much of ideas,
Not clichés or panaceas –
Ideas of revolution
That would topple my “solution.”
One grows fond of the ways of wrong.
Changing paths is not to belong.
But honest souls, always crying,
Must get to living or dying.
I turned the page, then another.
Howard Roark, a long-lost brother,
Compatriot of once-I-was,
Stood erect, fierce and proud because
Life was his, and this he well knew,
The mind was king, and kings it grew.
Words can paint pale scene of wonder
Of soul putting past asunder,
Of flying beyond the blue sky
And steeped in a real-world dye.
Hard-fought days surely followed, too.
New sight blends with work for the true.
But these many happy years hence,
No longer perched upon a fence,
I thank friend and Howard and she
Who gave glad birth to new-formed me.
It is her, the first of a kind,
Who let me see the worth of mind,
To whom I now do proudly stand
And say, thank you, my dear Ayn Rand.