Alchemisland

Using her last breath on a fickle rosary

Fasting to the last

Want for God’s love surpassing

Even the harshest reality

We look on with enmity, disguising jealousy 

Red beads, readings, pleadings, to the mercy of the lady of roses

Kneeling by a roadside ditch, scrying the scarred sky for divine signs

If she lives through night, she sings matins, then orisons and vespers

She confides to no one yet somewhere inside has told all and been forgiven

We the living, god-willing, call God a villain 

He left us here in pig swill, by demons driven and ridden

Angstridden, travelling across a blasted land riven by war and famine

The vanquished and the famished, the diseased and the ravaged

All desperate for a handout, lacking the strength to demand it

Though still there are savage bandits abounding, who thrive on manflesh

Such is the source of their dire strength and wiry spittle, hydrophobes

They wear white robes which they extoll with blood upon a kill, Phobos

Is their blood-visaged god, he visits them in the bog as man-visaged dogs

He demands the best of the villagers, the rest of the thresh

He is sated only by fresh flesh, for this he bestows blessing

Always in that place, they have plenty

Enough one eats here would feed elsewhere twenty

Cannot go twenty paces without seeing human debris

Death abounding, tragedy at every bend and corner round

The drowned, the rock shattered, the blameless, the hounds

Like changelings drowning in evil, blood bearded

It is some fever, some dark mediaeval dream 

Steam curls from the newly-dug vents, incense from a censer

Equal in redolence, lending a gothic splendour in Poe had precedence

If it is to that scribe ascribed, tis the incident of the masque of red death

Some delinquent pestilent come west from the east on fleas

Soon fleeing such midget hosts found another equal in coverage

The pope himself did wonder had Jove’s thunder recome

What will become of the world, what world will there be

She kneels, the old lady, something from antiquity

A vision of piety, sobriety, quiet kindness, solidity

Utterly at liberty, surety of her chosen divinity’s

Ability to deliver her cleanly to that greener, keener place

Promised in the ancient day, written plainly on the page

She treasures these moments outside transit

Where time is measured only by the rhyme of her novena

It seems she is sleepless, more time wisdomgathering Athena

She is not but is our leader, an elder and respected speaker

Queenly in repose, like a queen of oak of old, court holding

Holding the gnarled boughs like fasces heads, old iron

No more that mould exact is made, a custom piece, rare and unfaded

Despite advanced age, her transit from dawn to end of day

Had seen change unseen before that aeon, since creation maybe

They bring to her the woes and strifes, which judgement requires

She is thence presiding, a court is in session, a procession to her leisure

Place in the hopeful heart of an brindled oak choked with acorns

Before her the wild-eyed ephebes, of Thebes, bound for minotaurs

Or to die scorned and malformed, a king of corn flying only in storm

Given back to the protoform, soil and rock and leaching bog and more

Endurance of land through the hands of trade, in the bloody Aztec ways

On still going, survived unchanged since ancient days, the crude blade

Bays out still for satiation, the wheels of the nation squealing out

Needing the feeling of blood to wheeze to life greased wheeling

Mary first, the saints thanked last

Their prompt intercession is asked

Their resting places ashed

Their time past

Yet some element of them onward resides

The changeless blood of myroblytes

She sings and speaks of blood, like a vampire would

She is a woman of the rood, of the nail and wood

She is also of the grail, of the male in the wood

Splayed in the glade, glaived for the greatest good

After the blasts

On the shattered planet

On the fractured piazza

By the fallen altar and mutilated statuary

Others first, herself after

Morality beyond the hereafter

Profits much laughter

Sniggers from the crowd

Behind it no craft

No actor’s guile

She is her manner

She does not say but asks

She is not a slave

They think she will save them

She explains they only need to pray

Soon, the day of my death comes

It will be upon ye all not to be predated

I cannot coddle ye all forever

Let the bread ye eat be unleavened

And I pray again to meet ye all in heaven.