Limbo

Six steeple towers, cold as steel, drab daggers in the sky!

Their hallowed halls no longer call when breezes wander by �"

for, filled with dread to wake the dead, they've ceased to sough or sigh.

Coiled candle sticks! Their twisted wicks no longer 'lume the cracks

with dying flame, subdued and tame, mid pendant pearls of wax,

since deference to innocence dissolved in molten tracks.

Above! The dismal ditch of dusk reveals a velvet streak,

through which the winter’s wicked winds will sometimes weave and sneak,

and faraway a cable sways, a bridge clings hushed and bleak.

Thin shadows shift, like silver shafts, across the cruel moraine

reflecting white a wisp of light in ebon beads of bane

which casts a crooked smile across a faceless window pane.

Wan neon lights glow through the nights, through darkness sleek as slate,

while lanterns (hovered, high above, in lurid swinging gait),

haunt ballrooms, bars and bare bazaars, though no one's there to fete.

The souls who come with jagged tongue won't sing a silent psalm,

nor paint pale lips with languid quips to pierce the deathly calm,

nor pray for mercy, grace deferred, nor beg lethean balm,

nor yet redress the emptiness that shifting shades embalm �"

they've seen, you see, life’s brevity, and face it with aplomb.

Reviews

[Beccy]

This is a complicated poem; not so much because of the use of language, but because you have both an agile and complicated intellect and your poetry is thus so often tangential, which I personally find quite fascinating.

I take away from this, that perhaps in our brief three score year and ten, we remain more or less in limbo; unbaptised and unsure, though certainly not innocent; and that it is the next level which holds the greater fascination.

Beccy.

[Terry O'Leary]

Thank you, Beccy. I think your feeling is correct, although I had 'wider' emotions when wrote it... see my response to Valentine below...
Terry

[Valentine]

Terry, I know you live in France and do not know what news you get but this seems like the destruction of a city and its people. You have laid this write out so beautifully, I just wish I knew what was on your mind when you wrote this gem. Valentine

[Terry O'Leary]

Thank you, Valentine!
I had many 'things' in mind when I wrote it... yes, 'the destruction of a city and its people' through war... but, also, more generally, the destruction of our earth' through nuclear war and also the physical destruction of our environment through our crazy 'mismanagement' of it... and also, the result of what seems to me to be the increasing decay of our 'civilization'... on the other hand, I often (as here) intend to impart whatever the reader herself/himself can extract from it (things that perhaps never even entered my mind...
Terry

[Valentine]

Interesting!