Fears in Darkness – The Poet’s Guess – The Battlefield – Enemies in Life, Brothers in Death – A Knight Awakens – Thirst – The Bloody Stream

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Before the moon made visible that hell
The hawkish brush abstains from rendering
When eyes, chivalric, view their battled-art,
The land was framed phlegmatic, but for fear
Which has allotment in those mortal hearts -
Those women, men and children, Eden-born -
Who shame the night with their monstrosities;
Demonic fancies bearing blacker pitch
Than any starless void, for here the mind
Does dark injustice for a paler sin
Is often held beneath the tide of gloom
Which would not seek to stain the heat-wrung night
But for the traitor’s hoary gleam (that shadow,
When chastened, blames for its incontinence)
Dispelling crude illusions. Thus the moon
Illumes in reckless spite what fear wouldst shade,
Bringing to fore new depths for men’s despair;
Which e’en when deepened still the banners flock
T’ward horns of war, misgivings for the poets,
Sensitive and aloof from fields of death,
To furnish their pentameter with blood
From vague capillaries and ne’er seen bones
Which had not sundered ‘fore their clumsy pen
Had dropped and cracked the brittle ivory.
Yet long forgotten lies that battle lost
‘Tween those that know and those who would record,
Through dusky visions, tales which would alarm
Themselves, and those in kind, but never kings
To whom the warring dogs make fitter mates.
Yet from our muse we take our sustenance
And here she sings of sorrow thus illumed:
The dead in acres bound to crooked sleep,
Dreaming of glory writ upon their wounds;
Blood effigies to valor, crucified
In mud, in wells of mud, to honor prove.
Their brave escutcheon's tout the lion’s roar,
Who roars still, e’en with shielded body cleaved;
Tongue split, yet piercing silently. All
Was sound. All is silent. All will pass.
The living will be ransomed for their blood,
The dead are noble waste to fill no coffer
Until the rot returns them to the earth -
Their weapons having longer to decay,
Yet forged within a moment. Such is man
Who would surrender that which ages built,
Their mother’s quaking years and father’s pride,
To sanctify the loam with blood divine;
Tendering this embarrassment of flesh
On field’s fallow, tilled for oat and wheat
Yet now for naught as if a flame had swept
It’s once gilt surface. And those herald’s high,
Whose cries would chill the ears of Death,
We scorn yet know our place, for raven’s eyes
Serve us in better judgement than those courts
That speak of laws no willing man abides.
For herein lies a truer law of men:
To arbitrate by steel, sword and fire,
Though hardened is the heart that judges so.
Yet none could judge this hearing win or loss:
Two birds of prey, a thousand talons each,
Clawing and clawing, raging to mete what justice
Screeches from in the blood, ‘til each is blunt
And only beaks remain to carry on,
Testing each others mettle ‘mongst the throng.
These lords of war in death had fallen twain
Like brothers - for in death no malice reigns,
Except among those sons and daughters who
Aloof from that great leveler decree
The feud eternal. Yet from death one stirs;
Entangled in the heap he wakes encased
In armor blessed and blood not all his own.
A dire thirst begins his torment long,
For cheating death has pain to balance suffering
Lest groveling hell petition for its soul.
As Atlas holds the Earth so too the air
Above a casualty seem loaded high
With errant mountains, yet this soldier breaks
From his inertia ‘gainst the pounding weight
That should resolve him to the peace of death.
For greater is the force that bares aloft
His damnéd soul and t’wards that flowing life,
That fickle memory retained, he casts,
Trusting in God, yet trusting still the pain
That knows the North of it’s salvation. Hence,
In steps unending in drawn agony,
Knee-deep so oft in mire he despairs,
Past horse and man dismembered for the feast
Of nature’s cannibals, upon a stream
His searing eyes a moonlit blanket bask,
Emblazoned by a white celestial fire.
Unfit for any vision but this lone,
He falls upon his knees to drink his fill,
Heedless of the taint his tongue should find
Yet would, in its extremity, mistake
A sacramental wine for brackish mead.
Thus purged of that distress which the impaled
Beg for the god of any stripe to end,
The darkness moves aside for the abyss
And consciousness is bound until the dawn.