The heathen natives, living in crude huts now,
told them vaguely of a mighty kingdom
where Hannibal and Cleopatra ruled.
This was a city of bronze architects,
of bronze philosophers and of bronze poets.
The graffiti on the walls were hieroglyphs,
and the railway station Malcolm’s palace.
Similar Posts
Piss in the old man’s pail,
half moon carved out of pewter,the stars cruel as the night.Karpatia forgives,like Jezu on the wall,but not the wolves, the vipers,the flies, the maggots, time.
“My coming to England [sic] in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it. I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children’s coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children.”
June 10,1941He had fought in the trenches, watched the ratsgnawing the feet of dead or dying soldiers,the flower of Europa slain in youth.He understood Trakl’s pain, the grandsons whowould never father future generations.So the mission in his mind was clear:he climbed into the cockpit of a fighterand flew to Scotland. Ankle broken now,parachute on the…
(Eastern Siberia)
the heavens shed light on the skull and bonesof what looks like a halfway-risen man,a poet or a priest who died a slave,and, buried underneath dry brush and stones,lay for decades in a makeshift grave.But now he lingers in a paradiseof brambleberries, nettles, pines, and cones,with shadows in the sockets of his eyes,as if to…
Better than the burn of booze
is the cheap skid-row wine you useto light the day when you’re alone.As spleen and liver give up ghoststhe leaves go golden on their stems,then fall before the lord of hostswho neither cares, saves, nor condemns.The hand of the grandfather clockmoves you towards a grotto grave,while you lie ready by the rockor say goodbye beneath…
Abba, Pantocrator,
but to You, the Most High,You who lit the starsand gave a heartbeat to time.On my knees before the night,in every star I see you.Lift me from this realmof the lion eating the lamb,of the leopard eating the hare.Take me there where the fleshis neither hunted nor lusted,where the meek are meek,where the haughty are…
Within the four walls of this sonnet’s form
there is at least one happy story to tell,something lovely brought on by a storm.Fresh thrifts have sprouted, and a fat wormlazily crawls out of someone’s cracked bell,crawls out of the centre of someone’s hell,out of a skull atop a uniform,while not too far away, in someone’s rib cage,in a sunlit temple without a steeple,two…