Were you there, yesterday,
Broken day, strewn about the floor
Like a phoenix molting?
I remembered what you forgot.
Ashes, ashes everywhere,
And none of the children could see you,
All dressed up in charcoal robes,
A ritual for the resurrection.
Understand me when I speak to you.
Pero yo no puedo hablar ingles,
Solamente el idioma de los muertos,
And my mother sometimes warned me about you.
Beware the man with the crimson hat,
She'd sometimes say,
The only one in all the world
That won the world in one short day.
Do you believe you're better than them?
I do believe in the phoenix band,
The ones with the fiery feathered hats,
The only ones in all the world
That lost the world in one dead day.
I saw them once, so far away,
In London when I was twenty-three,
And ever since, I've looked for them,
So I can come alive again.
I've looked across the sea.
But they are dead, those two are dead!
And she would never yield to him,
And so the city wonders if
Her captors might release her.
When twice old Mary rings the hour
In the shadows of her lowly bower,
Listen closely to the leaden silence of the midnight.
You'll often find her not so still,
Not half so still as sometimes will,
And listen closely to the silence of the leaden midnight.
Methinks the bird reciprocates.
You really ought not ever trust
An avian immortal.
The thread is tightened by the Fates,
The deadly snip it now awaits,
And I can see quite plainly you have made a great mistake.
Are you convinced they're better than you?
The sun this morning was strangely hued,
Don't you think?
Like a flame detached from Dante's dream
To burn the brittle brink
'Tween then and now, and out did spring
A newer day for us to slay,
A newer blood to drink.
And it is done, and now it's done.
Forever falls from heaven,
And bursts into a grand inferno.
The phoenix flies to heaven.
10 October 2007
Review