Live! Live! Not one minute
more to solemnize the squaring truths
of the dark, exasperating. Exsanguinating.
The probing luminant, juggernaut
of dawn brought down as a quickening
shade of brilliance over the tar-black,
songless night – now gasping out
its own greying reminiscence.
Kicking against the goads, a denouement
of despair, decay’s quietus comes to mock.
But its voice is too dry now for anything more
than the androgynous whisper of a skeleton.
The bones rattle and try in vain to spark, to scare,
to survive the day, already here.
Death, this needy after-thought, this choking
wheeze of duskish, tight-lipp’d groaning –
it can no longer hunt, its legs are
broken, a dislocated shoulder no longer
suited to hefting hopelessness.
Spring! Spring! O antediluvian Spring! How
many are your salted children, lined up
outside your garden wall. Someone
has unchink’d the tangled gate and trodden new
footprints – fresh, ancient and deep – in the Virgin soil.
We come too, having hid ourselves in
the wisp of your blood-colour’d sleeves.
Droughted, now, a tomb and the perfect surprise:
breaths in lungs once shut, re-sighted eyes,
and in the first of all new hours,
Someone has made light work of death.
