Invocation

A discourse on life and love in Ottava Rima

Weave, O Sybil, weave the doom ahead

Daub on the misery, unfeeling muse

For every stitch of evil that you thread

With greater love the pattern you infuse

I’ve learnt the creases of your cloth to dread

But seek the pregnant ribbon running through

Loves lies weeping, mad and disappointed

Thus is every thinking soul anointed

Stars fly fanciful or guttering hollow

Perverse, the bugles mark their last descent

Where they have gone, my soul is chained to follow

More wretched still for seeing how they went

From princely splendour wheeling, into sorrow

By needles and by sin their circuits bent

You, O Love, the spacely emptiness in feeling

That while, like stars we stand, our souls are kneeling

You, O love; the Norn most fair and failing

At dawn excise the tumours of the heart

But stealing then all song, desert me ailing

At setting of the sun you wrench apart

The members of the mind, infecting, killing

And leaving merely cancer, only art

You taunt my trepidation stabbing still

With beauty, if could saintly beauty kill

Tears I’ve shed for you and bright blood watered

To make the worldly gardens clean and yours

Yet, though in losing humour I’ve been tortured

Man has never bled for greater cause

If ever Son of Man were strangely daughtered

He who raised the dead and virgin’d w****s

I say it would be you our Saviour most adored

For you alone, I’d go and sin no more.

Reviews

[Analgesia]

So dissonant and dischordant a love poem, plain beautifull in it's imagistic squalor. This is reallly impressive stuff, everything flows so well and every piece of figurative language truly adds to the piece instead of leaching off of it's meaning. I have absolutly no criticism this is great.