Saint Barbara

On Irish army banners sitting open-breasted upon a cannon

There among them, necks angled toward besieged Casale

Strides Headless Barbara

Patron saint of armaments

Miner protector, labourers misadventurous Death pursues ardently

Workers whom Undoing threatens in duty’s discharge

All arrows them targeting hedgehog her targe

Her headsman-held hair forms a red taj.

Queen of forking, night-dispelling light and rubbling dynamite

She frightens baleful death, fate’s paymaster

She is like a Beowulf, with sword and golden cup

Hooded, headless acéphale pale as Angel garb

She is flooding light erupting in hellish cells at a soul’s darkest corruption

Alighting shadows, woodlice scattered at stone’s disruption

Darklings wither at her visage held underarm, like an amphora serving rare vintage to Nero

Bare-breast cleft-chest hero’s heart recommences ceaseless blood

As a breathed hex sends cold winter away

So she slays those sated by nominative erasure from the Book of Days yet budded

Carting saved souls to safety, solifies dark ways.

Pasteboard’s peeled corner

Turned cards revealing Dervish-spiralling fortune wheels

Hers is the holy steel whose speed unreal unhorses enemy Anpiels

Ahead bare-limbed Erelim, riding in William Tell’s arrow applebound shapes.

Unsparing miracles provoke chapel perilous

A sun-struck monstrance strung upon a long pole abiding heliotically

Her helot pages death-scorning zealots

Her war-willing willpower is their heroin

Sixteen neck wounds in the Illiad Homer wrote

Her secret draught of heroism provokes in soldiers skin-schisming warp spasms

Catalogue of ships her navy’s curator commands his navvies to haul anchor and tie hempen hawsers

Great disembarkation under argent moon, Argi of many nations

Here to be grated or made great in hateful melees.

Maize stalk myrmidons, death stalks the camp a flagless, disloyal murderer

Turning out Corn Kings

Singeing lashes as a Hashmal harnesses

Wound-festooned Granfalloons gluing in guts with hands

Death prayers, ungripped balloons, rising from a red-blued beachhead

Barbara’s army marches robotically whilst she reclines like Shalott’s lady in a palanquin with scalloped fringes and bronze heron wings

Cuckoldry cannot enflame but seeing rivals afield ires her to an Hera.

Alchemisland