Elegy

Sleep then, rest among the stars
Dream of those days when your words replaced myth
Where all that you breathed, became the just so.

You created the spring-coiled mornings,
And infused dust-filled days, so that they’d led
To evenings replete with quiet contentment.

What now is the purpose of a life without beauty?
What now is the purpose of a life without duty?
What now is the purpose of oblivion?

If you understand it, it’s not 'it' you have understood
The gap between melody and each second tone -
Resides in an absence beyond language.

We know places through faded recreations of creation
The tides have washed away faces drawn in sand
Only light holds no understanding, of time.

I meet ghosts who do not know they’re dead
Who recite the poetry from the shade on the dial,
And know not from where, of a yet to come...

Of the wind that will blow the dust from your throne,
And allow that cold, magisterial emptiness
To be filled again by your sublime sense of things.

Reviews

[John the Baptist]

Has the sound of an elegy, but the subject of it is never named. Whoever it was seems to have had a profound effect on the speaker, almost to the point of worship. The last verse, indeed, speaks of a throne and a sublime sense of things. All of this seems to point to something beyond the human sphere.

[Casey Truax]

Much to ponder here. The sense of loss is deep. The fourth stanza sounds to me very Eastern, a sense of intuitive rather than rational understanding, like the way the mind anticipates the development of a melody.