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Hanging day. A hollow earth
Echoes footsteps of the grave procession
Walls in sunspots
Lean to shadows of the shortening morn
Behind, an eyepatch lushly blue.
The wall of prayer has taken refuge
In a peace of blindness, closed
Its grey recessive deeps.
Fretful limbs
And glances that would sometimes
Conjure up a drawbridge
Raised but never lowered between
Their gathering and my sway
Withdraw, as all the living world
Belie their absence in a feel of eyes
Barred and secret in the empty home
Of shuttered windows. I know the heart
Has journeyed far from present
Tread. Drop. Dread Drop. Dead
What may I tell you? What reveal?
I who before them peered unseen
Who stood one-legged on the untrodden
Verge – lest I should not return.
That I received them?
That I
Wheeled above and flew beneath them
And brought them on their way
And came to mine, even to the edge
Of the unspeakable encirclement?
What may I tell you of the five Bell-ringers on the ropes to chimes
Of silence?
What tell you of rigours of the law?
From watchtowers on stunted walls,
Raised to stay a siege of darkness
What whisper to their football thunders
Vanishing to shrouds of sunlight?
Let no man speak of justice, guilt.
Far away, blood-stained in their
Tens of thousands, hands that damned
These wretches to the pit triumph
But here, alone the solitary deed.
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