Vesuvius

It’s going to blow. The saxophone sexuality of a volcanic slumber has become a thundering in our hearts. We feel it in the thigh of being and in the strung valleys of elbows and knees. Olives groves and vineyards tremble in their green dreams. Village churches stumble over their stone steps. Black bedecked widows plead their prayers under the clamor of evermore strident bells. Forewarnings rumble everywhere, molten threats menace, hazards hover, hang and heap upon our heads. The quaking cone seems nearer. We tread water upon fretful tracks the land leans, is less latched together, leavers and the lost move more slowly wading through the darkling dust of history, Imagining now the terraced hills already sliding to the sea.