Marian’s Passion

She lived somewhere
That had become her life.

The rising dawn crept up...
Across the pallor of her face
She knew the day had come
To leave the web of safety ...
Where she’d hidden with her
Curled up pain ..and...
Walk... walk back again ... into the memory
Which came and came

The goatskin bag upon her hip.
Mile after mile .. she trod
Before her blurring eyes.. boned dogs
And hungry ungulates

Her thoughts like insects...buzzing
In the night.
When morning came
She knew that she was nearer.

The half seen walls
The city.....
....tight tumbling stones
Unquiet stones
A crush of mud and light.
That city where the world forever came in war
Between the seas beneath a mountain range
Built on the ruins of yet another ruin..
In layered pain ... culture taken..

There would be no-one there
To greet her
No sustenance from cornucopias..no friend.

Lifting the mask of time from her face (forbidden)
What was it that she saw
Upon the line close to the Land
She had once loved ?

Memories ...
To shut them out...
Means only they return.

Sorrowed corpses tossing in her mind
Twisted bodies of the vanished slain
The A Capella of their Cries
Lost in the marching forces of the new...

Wounds tear into most violent hues
As tho’ a human is not art and music too
But only flesh and bone
..and blood...
Reduced ...without a spirit
Like any creature stamped upon..
A Beetle or a Bee.
Mortality in dust
Without an anima .

Half fallen city . blown out...hanging
As a giant shattered tomb.

They crawled from broken walls
Some wrapped in shawls.
They stood like time marked out
In dusty dots
Shadows in a shadowed land
With eyes like pools lit up
By lethal moons...

Fear has a rancid reek

She stood quite still
...a statue carved by ancient tools..
Her arms like pendent souls
Down by her sides.
The movement in her bones
Only a shallow breath.

Her mind ...
A place of babbling sounds
A rising din of noise
In her remembrance he lived,
He did exist
Flies at his blood stained lips.

The shot ...the howl
The whimper ..

But now...
She cast off time
The years were gone
The silence over..

Her cry cut out across the sky
To fall between the planets
Like a jagged shooting star..

And with her words
She speared the great immense.

“ They came...oh yes they came...
A callous membrane round their pith
Sadistic nectar in their veins
Old men...young men..
Lured by their lust ... for plasma

My son..my flower... not yet fruit
Small against armed men in metal boots..
Mowed down... .annulled
His child heart blood
Torn out to bleed
Into this ground.
My son. ...My son. “

The Goatskin bag
The knife....
The dark alizarin ran down her skirts
And gathered at her feet.
She would now join her child...
The shadows out of sight.

Kristine Byrne...Jan-May 2013