Free Verse
A Quiet
Darkness Falls
Summer petals fall
soundlessly on stone,
the light that leaves us
makes no noise.
Into that aching void
the leaves conspire,
colours flamboyant
with all spent love-lit days
gilding, russetting, crimsoning,
gathered defiant
to follow the wind.
Silence follows
the rustle of vanish,
the daylight frays
as night knits hours
to wear as weight
on cooling hearts.
Firesides mimic
the heat that lit our dreams
before decline into shadows of purpose,
opaque chrysalis
of quiet darkness.
Discards
I walked the
wind-gritted path
in the dark morning,
a sulky sun displeased, withdrawn.
Pine-cones and bird feathers fallen,
a wee mouse who did not escape
the night hunter,
surprised leaves cast out,
omens that spoke their runes
to the vulnerable
in the season of discards.
A fall from grace and glory
begins again—
a winnowing of the passionate
who dreamt too much,
the lovely who faded, the runners who fell.
Caught between seasons
reaching for light ropes
before the fist of discard.
The Unlit Fields of Night
Gather in the light
for darkness follows fallow
leaving fields of unlit spectres
awaiting the bare unaware
toed and cloven
webbed and woven
astral feet,
no icons of day to shape the path.
Star-pierced, moon-riven
spider night nets
fracture illusion.
Tears of mortal loneliness
crevice these fields,
the crackling mockery of gods,
invented to hide the shock of dark,
fireflies out of the fields of night
where we are alone.
Then is pain magnified in a moon-glass,
dream fragments flicker
in the shadows,
vanities and fears silhouetted
abutting the black-mask stage
where futility is the theme of the masquerade.
What grows in night fields
where dusk fires blister fair feet and shallow crops?
Where we stand to offer day-dregs
turn down cups
petition answers,
here is the muddied well of brief being,
beginning and end of life-form
vortex of spirit—
for all the truth is dark.
