PRETA
Are we cradled in this new, cold dawn
Or do we fall weightlessly,
Our feathered bones hollowed by the mighty?
It comes in waves and seems to say
You must remain, but I,
A majority of one,
A minority of millions,
See no way to please the chosen machine.
We weigh nothing,
Vaporous, without memory,
Vacated, echoing,
The inconvenient, avoided, disregarded,
Re-written.
What it is we seek has not been found
In this slow, death-quiet brightening.
This birdsong is not for us
Nor has been given us this breeze.
No blessings that are not earned,
No comfort not calculated.
To fall without sound, to fray
And neatly dissappear,
Not to whimper or moan,
Nor to cry out to the invisible.
I shall put on the wings of the crow,
His sharp eye.
I shall guiltless rise on storm
And consume the already dead.
Guiltless and open as the sky.
To accept nothing, to bless everything.
Our peace cannot be stolen:
It only lives within us,
And cannot be traded
Nor snuffed out.
Yet we tread the ruts of long war,
Futile, strive to best these dark passions
With muddy fires and sounds of ripping time.
Run, run, from silence,
Run from stillness.
The hounds of midnight mad for blood:
Their hunger is our failure to face
The white mirror of emptiness,
The fall,
The long fall,
With no end.
O ye birds of silent air,
Ye travellers before dawn.
—-
simonhlilly 