A HARD RAIN
The one ring roars in the mountains
Cracking worlds in idle curiosity.
Nonchalent, malevolent, intelligent cities
Breed hungry ghosts who howl and tear and are never satisfied,
Though everything holy is in their grasp.
Silence floats naked and alone
As the dice shifts this way then that.
Helpless are those
Who have been taught right from wrong,
Helpless the nights in the face of relentless light.
For sixty years now the screen
Has flickered from prescience,
Restless souls doubting the wit of the future.
By increments the images breath and take life,
Jumping dreams, shadowing into being,
Sparks from each fire, windblown,
Begin to eat their own existence.
In this year
All mirrors became broken
Or smudged to smoke.
So enchanted, we could see
No longer what we had become.
In this year
A growl of wind
Scattered the minds of many,
Leaving them empty singing hymns
And rhymes from childhood.
In this year
The very bricks and stones
Of our homes became soaked in sorrow,
So it seeped into each shadow
And downcast each ray of light with dust.
Laden heavy, we shuffled about,
Having lost all will to sing
And all skill to speak eloquence.
In this year
A great plague of demons political
Infested the homes of the nation.
Whatever was tried, failed to oust them,
Until despair weighed heavy on the weak and helpless.
Cities rang hollow with empty eyes.
Rapacious beasts lived in the high windowed buildings,
Though few noticed the slowing of time
And the long shadowed echoes,
So dismayed were we by our long ignorances
And taken up with dreams of bright illusion.
Echo and Decay.The concept of the overlay of events and times, the repetition of events, same old stuff, images of decaying vegetation superimposed on extracts from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which recorded each year’s major events in England from the sixth to the twelfth centuries, and Anglo-Saxon poetry. Not complete pieces but trials and try-outs.
simonhlilly 