Dead stop
Footsteps ring out
How hollow the flagstones
Sharply the box is dropped downwards
Grave sealed.
NB Had some eye trouble. Next week I'll have an eye operation. Hopefully in a week I I will recover.
They laid her in a damp black hole long ago.
Surrounded by tall dark cypress trees,
The winds sighed softly in sorrow,
While I stood head bowed down in grief.
Lifeless leaves fell in brown bunches,
And covered up her ghostly grave,
I swept them off to clean the flagstones,
Strewed instead flowers fragrant and sweet.
We could have had a lovely marriage,
We could have had unlimited love.
Wisely, she wanted only the present,
Wisely, she rejected all but love.
Now she's gone, and all these years,
I dream of changing the ghastly past,
I visit her resting place and ask
Is she still praying for me from up on high?
At three, the garden writes itself in slime—
silver calligraphy across the flagstones
where I pace in my wool habit, sweating.
The moths are frantic priests
hurling their small bodies at the lamp’s false sun,
again, again, a liturgy of burning.
I used to call this Devil’s hour.
Now I know there is no Devil,
only the slug’s blind pull toward rot,
the cartography of appetite
mapped in mucus on the path
where saints once walked to Matins.
The hostas are being eaten.
Something is always eating.
I watch a moth singe its wing-dust on the bulb—
that powdery baptism, useless—
and drop stunned to the stones
where a slug begins its pilgrimage across the corpse.
This is the only honest prayer:
mandibles working in darkness,
the chemical shimmer of a slug’s foot
seeking the soft meat of decay.
No one is listening. No one was ever listening.
The garden teaches me its single lesson—
matter consuming matter,
the world folding into itself
like hands at vespers, purposeless,
perfect. The moths know
what I am only learning:
light is not love. Light is just light,
and we are who burn for.
Insidious fingers of flickering phantoms
Cast in the bloody gold haze of frozen pain, sorrowing.
Reveling players reaching past the present memories, moments
Cemented in ashes.
Merriment mars the perfect surface of poetic sin
Flint and steel, stealing life from lungs, suffocating.
Iron shadows cast upon the flagstones, grating
Perfidious souls.
Bone and metal clash as laughter echoes
Loud in the empty rooms, the sound of finality.
Twisted gnarled chords like chains of death, desolation
Chaotic revolutions round the sun.
Sharp and shallow, shards of breath
Immolation for the amusement of others,
Emulation a thing to be detested.
Nothingness remains.
I love the tranquility
there is a peace like no other
where hidden birds sing melodies
and little creatures scurry
and time stands still
I like to read inscriptions
on tombstones in the dappled sun
or rain wet or snow covered
gravestones monolith
flagstones flat and small
all the RIP inscriptions
camera in hand and journal ready
I note one stone's inscription
it reads U N K N O W N
this of all the stones
among the rows and rows
with no name, no date, no record
no flowers ever I am sure
no memorial of any kind
this unknown stone has broken my heart . . .
____________________________
November 9, 2017(edit, April 21, 2020)
Poetry/Free Verse/Among the Stones
Copyright Protected, ID 20-1245-487-03
All Rights Reserved, 2020, Constance La France
Submitted to Strand Pick B
sponsor, Brian Strand
Third Place
There is no Path
but there is where I have trod.
There is no Path
but there are promises.
There is no Path
despite the signs.
There is no Path
despite the flagstones.
There is no Path
but there is where I have trod.
I may only truly
come to've earned the word
'path' at all
if after walking,
if after blazing,
if after course-correcting,
if after wearing thin the souls,
if after pollinating the soil;
step-by-step;
as a bee,
as a bird,
as the wind...
If I should spin
on heels
and cast a gaze
from whence I came
I may then call that
...a path.
But it is locked in the
keyless prison of representation
and, if it weren't,
it'd only then
be my path
not yours;
and even not mine
for I've walked
and changed
so, no.
Despite some sort of arrival
and having walked-ness
the 'path' seized
in quiet desperation by my mind
must one day be loosed
and seen for
all its never-there-before
'twasn't true-ness.
There is no Path
but there is where I have trod.
Once on Cecil Place
fledgling flagstones freckled
like summer faces
in Septembers of taut cypress.
Now neglected planters are urns
for my young ashes,
crypts gaping silent screams.
Blistered doors do not divulge
past secrets,
gravure images are gravel
on a eroding drives.
Fissured streets
are cracked mirrors
reflecting shards of selves.
Time is a slumlord
its seconds a legion
of termites.
I'm a pillar of salt;
I should not have looked.
6/1/17
You stood there in the empty room
with sadness on your face
a memory of years gone by
lay silent in its place
A house you’d built
with your own hands;
no longer yours to own
against your will, abandoning
this place you once called home
The old wood floors were splintered now
and flagstones on the hearth
seemed to whisper "take us too
don’t leave us in the dark!”
A tired broom leaned wearily
against the fireplace
and wind that moaned so eerily
blew through without a trace
It rattled soft the dingy glass
within the windowpane
and seemed to call
“this house will fall to eminent domain”
Natty disasters sitting in boneyard wing
Hidden rolling shadows re-occurring
Tumbles the rain that rapture bring
All sodden on Golgotha fog·ging
Utterly murky shadows about
Dank teeth beyond the tomb square
The blindness of the swollen moon thereabout
Lightning strike, bitter air scare
The sky cracks as if slashed by a knife
Somewhere in yonder thunder blast wave
Sneak trees creak into the air life
Sinister and frosty on the grave
Spread quaking fears under midnight stroke
Dull spirits near shadowy flagstones
Grasping dark devils amongst the cloud choke
A poet's life, a written dream captured around ghostly tombstones
In Paradise, in it's grass, they dig holes.
In which, to place the ashes of those who can pay.
The grass grows between the Cloisters, Cathedral and
the silence of stone monks.
From within the Cloisters, echoing steps on flagstones, ricochet out through gothic arches,
along, with whispers, low hum chatter, and the noise of a refectory serving dinners.
This pleasant blend rises above Paradise, like a singing congregation and choir exalts, filling hearts with glory.
There must be days when the green blades can hear the psalms at matins, through to the hymns of evensong, smell the dinners served, and recognise familiar voices and their steps.
Days when the sun warms the ground, blessing the soil, which is listening to the warm of Paradise.
Well worth paying for.
Don't think it is all moonshine
She sees ,but a darkness too
Glide manlike over flagstones
That shine like her firelit eyes.
Think not of silence either,
But the scrape of a drawn bolt.
"Is that you John?" she whispers.
The soft throaty purr
Of a returning plane
Bringing back memories
Of sun dappled waves
Washing sun drenched sand
Where bodies bronze
On a rainbow beach.
Those warm evenings
when the rich red rioja
Lends a luscious lustre
To the spicy tapas.
How commanding
etched in sharp shadow
Are the towering churches
Promising a cool retreat
Within,safe from the relentless
Baking heat of flagstones
On fire.
Captured on camera
And soon to be lost
In dusty albums
Or forgotten on Facebook
Next year the caravanserai
Will begin again
The pilgrimage to the sun.
The sermons nearly finished, suddenly a happening befalls my eyes
Our congregation now sits silent, amidst echoing tearful cries
An old man we know as Tommy, he's the retired Rector of our Academy
Now lying silent on the stone cold flagstones, he disappeared from see
Motionless to ashen in lie, worried faces in concern surround
Whilst a face appears from the tears, slowly kneeling on this hallowed ground
In tenderness sigh exhale, her hands now adorn his chest
In gentle moving motion, resuscitation is now addressed
Minutes appear like hours, when suddenly two eyes now open see
Where I'm sitting like others around, what's happening in front of thee
No miracles are cried out loud, simply a calmness by she who coped
All because a face from our congregation, gave us a moment for hope
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