Sy Roth Poet Free verse

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.

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