L'Nass Shango Poet Free verse

An Urn In Time - For Dr Clarke, Egyptologist

He was our best, an urn in time
With all the fragments of jewelled history
But now today hear how the bells chime
The griot's pen scroll another pain on memory.

For all his knowledge of the scrolls, 
the dark charon came and rowed him away. 
Surprise translates not in this expectation 
urning lark song and sage alike. 
The griot, `til his yes were dark as the underworld 
of pyramid and tomb, had sung this strange thing 
that substanced splendour and dread with a long shadow from the womb. 
What is death? What is it to dread? 

He who dead kingdoms studied should have known. 
He should have seen the ages past and Egypt's glory gone. 
Dread never did enter that granite mind amidst the crumbling 
of black Atlantic pillars that bore the globe's splendour; 
It eroded mortal heart and urned past. Some tolled sweat 
to sing what time had done outside his fortress window. 
O, he knew by heart how time imperial creeps 
and set itself against all a man's desires, urning them. 
Death is the coming of the night, the silence of the voice, 
the fall of rage like leaf from a temple of a regret. 
For all his griot days of song, he was sad to rejoice 
now the past is dead, and no presence urns the void

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