Betwixt the Heartbeats

Not in the sanguine ordinance of the heart, nor in the fugitive embassy of breath, but in that inviolate interval where succession relinquishes its crown, Love keeps its unspoken dominion. Who schooled the blood in scarlet mysteries, Or taught the clay such inward majesty? Not flesh, whose borrowed splendours fade like seas When Time withdraws its ancient sovereignty; But that concealed and antecedent fire Whose silence outlives every mortal choir. I passed beyond the ivory walls of bone, Where marrow held a vigil without name; Where things forgotten before they were known Lay folded in an immemorial flame; And there the dark, unburdened of disguise, Looked through my soul with uncreated eyes. The heart, that bronze confessor of the dust, Raised its twin thunder toward the vault of years; One stroke proclaimed the visible world to trust, The next dissolved beyond the reach of spheres; And in that breathless cleft between the two, Eternity remembered what we knew. There Chronos laid his sceptre in the sand, And Number lost the kingdom it had won; The stars grew still beneath an older hand, As night confessed the labour of the sun; For Being, stripped of all its borrowed art, Returned to the silence beneath the heart. Then came the vision reason could not bind: A shadowless bird passed through a mountain’s core; No wound remained upon the adamant mind Of stone that had endured the world before; Yet from its depths there trembled into air A song that no created throat could bear. Then I beheld what no decree could prove: Love was not flame, nor breath, nor mortal claim; It was the interval where all things move Before they enter form and take a name; The hidden mercy no beginning owns, The pulse between the marrow and the stones.
Copyright © | Year Posted 2026

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