Burial Grounds

 

Long days are bored by culture and sunlight.

As evening draws in, time tires of making lines and circles

and drives dark sounds downwards with mysterious force.

 

They seep through tender ground, shuddering drunkenly

before the spirit of the earth, and become slight songs

who shed their graces at the gates of a half-marble kingdom

wedged underground by daemons.

 

Columns hold back soil in an endless struggle with degradation

to protect remnants of the dead

who are clothed by neither map nor discipline

who wait with mossy throats and tangled hair

in a fog of anticipation.

 

Most noise is silenced in this world

but an echo crawls between brittle lungs

to awaken her voice with a jet of blood

pained with the freshness of near life.

 

A sound escapes Death’s punctuation,

but her body will stay in this chasm of stale air and waxen hands

sealed by pitch turned over with flowers.

 

So she lies dreaming of geometry when she enters half-sleep,

guiding breezes beneath broken arches of shadows

with a voice like a wound filled with dark water.

-2014-