Night,
Ageless and porous,
Sang screeches of fireflies of
Crescendo-diminuendo sparks.
What hour?
In the midst of the hustles, I lost my hoursight
Different, tonight, is my eyesight, seeing even
Through the darkest foliage of gentle, but sinister
Caress sway.
On the broken, cracked slabs, squatting, dark torsos!
Pensive, broken, sad, old and so good the
Work of Italian sculptors.
Further deep in searching glare, the hardened
Mats of hurried sepultures of returning
Soldiers, whose wellingtons have squelched in
Mudblood.
Wars and battles never post blandishments
On peace.
What hour now, brother?
It is so dark and mean, and my hourglass refuses a
Moon reflection.
But now the hours move fast on march of the
Headless feet in wellingtons.
'Left, right, left, right....'
Dolts hasten among fleeing marabouts.
Stench from ailing, balmed smog
Stills the whiffs of roasting deer, all in
One silence of close hour canticles...
Such phalanx, brother, coldens the head.
Fading stars cloak the blistered midnight skyline,
whilst burning embers of a whistling fire swirl mournfully
in the impending winter winds.
Alabaster flakes drift, creating dunes along the receding shoreline.
I lay between long-forgotten beach bones,
memento mori.
Breath catches in my throat,
and all the while, I press my cyanotic fingers against the crumbling relics,
tracing what was once porcelain life,
now abandoned, left to decay with the sands of time,
as soon I, too, will become lost in this bleached necropolis.
Laid naked and bare,
Dilapidated beyond repair,
Deeper within the dark bowels of ruined Ultair,
Whose ruler is a Litch,
A city rises from a darken phosphorous pitch
of shadows and mists of unhallowed portraiture
whose sights are akin to visual torture.
Where evils forgotten lie in one's peripheral,
perpetuating fears begotten and ethereal.
Do not fret and be a fool.
Lest you forget what may beguile.
For what dwells here, of those curious shall lure;
Creatures whose countenance spell the very essence of fear,
whose residence unwillingly endure.
However, so I say, you would be wise to obey,
To never venture into the night,
of this foul blight,
not a city.
Wherein darkness consumes the most radiant of light without pity.
From silken mists scarred stones give tongue
To canticles raised to twilit drear,
Of frolicked hours when seasons were young,
And Promise chastised every fear.
Once brightly smiled upon our days
The kindly sun of Life's beauteous womb,
The reaching hearts, our breathless gaze
Died not nor sleeps within this tomb,
But thunders soft from lips long stilled
No lonely dirge, nor dour 'plaint,
For 'neath these cold mounds Love's not stilled,
Nor slumbers lame with voiceless throat,
It whispers yet though rude encased,
E'en past Death's flowered moat
Too strong a song to be effaced...
Two
Granite
Twin lapids
Nest a couple
Died in the same day
With only few minutes
Of difference in the deaths
Sealing a vow made with a kiss
Love will last after eternity
Even in the quiet necropolis
__________________________________
For Overgrown With Vines Poetry Contest
Sponsored by Broken Wings
Fourth Place
October 7, 2016
Bryant’s Necropolis Conceit
Silent halls of death so cometh
William Cullen Bryant
Thanatopsis supremeus now
A sepulchre awaits us all.
Dour darkness and shroud forever
Thanatopsis-Phantasmus
The spirit world so beckons us
We all shall so wither and fall.
Gary Bateman, Copyright © All Rights Reserved,
(January 15, 2015) (Double Dactyl)
Susan’s pale fingers—
breathless in necropolis
(C) rajat kanti chakrabarty
Inconceivable
Dark, Dark, far from sun
Dead souls rose, silence................
A new world has begun............
The binomial scrolls list captive waste,
But the breathing chrysalis bound to the dark
Secured to the radian orbital stone
In the peripheral absence of the lark
She breathes alone
She remains unknown
She has no divisor to wilt her life
Nor governing census of phylum and foe
No patent pending inscription to wear
She has no divisor and no ratio
She is entombed
But she’s not doomed
The abyssal eclipse consumes their eyes
And the nebulous ash is in between
Their venom, their amulet of death
Embalms only the ones seen
Their sun is rayless
Their sky is starless
Upon the global breadth they have marched
Wearing arcane lenses of blinding light
Blistering bane of knowing all
Thinking the wrong is right
At the ecliptic frontier
I shed a lonely tear
April rains over my body
like a dripping faucet at night
it forms a cold rind around my eyes
and fills a borrowed
dinner jacket
like the double-chin of a
fat, sweaty lecherJohn.
this body's swollen and
the earth turns to sea
around me.
Rosewood; Oak; pine-slabbed flotilla
bobbing downstream
downup, down, up
like the sun-baked summer child
on a sun-hot trampoline:
a diver coming up for air.
We follow the bends in a
slow, unyielding procession
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