Dismissal
No payment for admission: behold your heirloom –
a comely relic, refuge from the dread of being
overtaken. A place to be deciphered,
it speaks through a silence
whose encroaching woodland compasses your soul’s dilemma.
A bed of lilies? In that stable time
each moment was a stall from which the upward yearning
of the spirit’s perpendicular intent
could soar unchecked,
pure as a flower in a solitary ascending –
its fruit the fall, the prostrate adoration,
a horizontal way to where the term of distance
is no longer visible. In which direction
lies our rest?
Across the sodden fields stout cooling-towers
are adamant: pressure is generation …
Cross-quarter winds distract your spell of calm
with squally buffets: they throw these walls
wide open,
blow concrete sky-high offices to dust.
Old empty cloisters contradict
your will that now may be for ever, here,
for bygone choirs attract our desecration –
a screwed-up beer-can
drops like a turd in a vacant gesture of contempt.
But leafy places in their grey rain
go with you when you turn away, conglomerate
all angry griefs. Rank moss, the mud,
a shattered arch,
rebuke your hopeless craving for some end to loss,
for you are in a taking, a time for resolution.
This landscape that we scrutinize is of our blood
as of our merciful undoing. You may depart in peace.
The world’s in arms
and unheard belfries ring the call to prayer.
Page(s) 22
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