Walpurgis

A Night of Walpurgis By Sy Roth The April moon hung in the sky Full, like nightshade fighting off the darkness The strident masses hung about the street corners Chests puffed out readying to rid the night With Walpurgis bonfires And dance the dance of victory around the books burning. Clustered in mounds like ravenous termites Beneath the streetlamps that flickered their tungsten tongues They burbled their blathering absurdities into the night, Nattering mobs of communal revulsion Their toes itched to play ring-around-the Rosie While praying to gods of fracture. Their dance of extinction Evil spirits wrapped in the cellophane of fierce, star-gazing lunacy. The saint of the night was anxious for her full-throated hordes To sing to her their idylls of a fevered brain To see them circumnavigate the blaze. Will the spring ever rise from their ashes? Will the maypole Terpsichore gladden their hearts While the words burn And the letters soar to the heavens of their train of tears? So sure, the dancers Certain of their rite of spring-- The songs of the beasts snort and dig at the dirt in their dreams Melt under an umber sky. Smithied gates mark their entrance into a flaming world Read the words that make them free But they immolate them Leaving smoldering ashes as they cavort about in celebration. Walpurgis weeps.