Dies irae

Our lives are increments 

by which the world changes 

from a garden to a grave, 

the sexton's spade a plough 

turning the soil since dawn in Eden 

to the end of days, and He 

who first enclosed this acre,

has returned, as was foretold,

to decide what now becomes of us. 

A fanfare announces His arrival, 

scattering sounds like seeds

to root through every tomb in the land,

and in their soil find hidden sins 

to bring into bloom. What graves

will the Gardener find rank with weeds, 

to scythe into the fire? What fragrance 

will our souls yield for Him to cherish

and preserve? Or will He be too late?

Impatient for judgment, 

we have judged ourselves.

Drought and deluge, fire and flood, 

famine and strife, have left an arid Eden. 

There are no more graves.

The stone of every tomb crumbles to dust, 

and is swept and stirred by hot siroccos 

into anonymous drifts, heaping in dunes 

our indistinguishable delinquencies,

our inextricable souls beyond salvation. 

Ashes

You see those stars?
That's the world burning down
in ten thousand little bonfires.

That's how much I love you:

I don't have time

to show you all the ways

- I'd need to be immortal -

so instead, I set fire to the world

to light the way to world's end.

I'll be gone, but my love will endure,

and you will find it waiting there for you, 

my wedding ring among the world's ashes.

The false men

All landscapes are ritual landscapes,

their routines coiled up inside each other,

slowly unwinding in a world of overlapping lifetimes,

from the beat of a bee's wings, to the heaving of tides,

to the pulse of the seasons and the centuries 

and the sediments and slow upheavals of geology,

and men raise circles, like gears with teeth of stone

to mesh with and turn the machinery of heaven,

the Earth cartwheeling with the constellations.

The monuments established lines of sight 

that draw the eye to star set on the world's rim,

but all that men learn now are repertoires of desecration, 

perspectives limited and priorities curtailed

until everything is reduced to chaos, 

and every step becomes a trespass in this place

where once we walked with gods. 

We must unhitch ourselves from the apparatus

by which we are bound to reckon the ebb of wealth, 

the chaotic tides on which we have set ourselves adrift,

stop counting the seconds that sentence us 

to the custody of coin and the cultivation of cash.

We must expiate the theft by which we possess it,

and hear other rhythms instead of these drums

to which we march in our own country as if in conquest.

Perhaps then we too can raise monuments

that will endure like these stones, 

surrender ourselves to that place beyond remembering

where those who built them now dwell.

When tongues are confused, speak in silence.

Let stone carry what we have to say

beyond the circumference of the clock we abandon,

which keeps time for the affairs of men today. 

They call you the false men, 

ancient giants turned to stone,

for refusing to accept the word of the Lord, 

but who is guilty of the greater error, 

you or your accusers, who have disappeared 

with the season of their squabbles and insinuations 

and the virtues they bestowed only upon themselves. 

Lies were told but truth endures,

even without men to speak it. 

(An information plaque at The Callanish Stones reads "locally the stones were known as 'Na Fir Brìghe' ('The False Men'), giants who had been turned to stone for refusing to convert to Christianity" 

[N.B. "Brìghe" seems to be a misprint on this notice, which should probably read "Bréige" - "Na Fir Bréige" would indicate "the men of lies" as opposed to "Na Fir Brìghe" which denotes something like "the men of substance". Perhaps the misprint is trying to tell us something.])

The pity

There is more to condemn in this world

than there is time for censure, 

more to celebrate than there is time for praise, 

and in between we fall to rancour 

only to prove how little we have learned 

about this world, and how little we know 

about each other. We presume to speak for others

and yet remain strangers to ourselves,

are quick to raise our voice in indignation

but stay silent when what is required is remorse, 

assemble to denounce criminals but grieve alone, 

while forgetting we should all pity and be pitied

for there is more to condemn in this world 

than there is time for censure, 

more to celebrate than there is time for praise. 

Tether

The fire and flood,
the plague in our blood,
the rich in the sky,
while poor drown and die
or struggle for breath:

those who dodge death
to orbit aspire
while Earth is on fire,
and I truly hope
the virus and smoke
that makes millions choke
is found out in space.

When you win your race
the ribbon's a noose
for all the abuse,
and every excuse
twists into a rope.

Prediction

We live in the era
of the weary Cassandra,
the jilted Jeremiah:
all prophecy exhausted, 
the oracle is hoarse,
too tired to testify,
witless with witness fatigue. 
You heard the warnings.
You chose to ignore them.
It's your turn to scream.

Winter

That change from wonder to fear:

it was not the thing we fear that changed.

Something else spoke to us.

We would have been indifferent

but for a rumour whispered 

in the leaves of last year's autumn. 

We summoned courage to chase ghosts. 

The woodlands waited for us 

to realise we had been tricked,

even while rivers froze and snow fell

during the season of our neglect.

We cut their limbs for the fire

around which we told tales of heroism,

of dragons slayed, and the part we played 

in defeating the monsters we had heard of.

They waited as if our imagined histories

might eventually cure us of the rumour, 

and while they waited I left the circle 

and went outside and waited with them,

my breath crystalising into a thousand stars.

Pebble

On the shore, a pebble:
a thumbnail sized lozenge of stone
lying among larger siblings.
The sea, insistent as a mother,
nudges shingle over and over,

tucking it in, tumbling and polishing it
into smooth pale breasts of quartz,
tight black fists of basalt,

speckled eggs pregnant with the ancient past,
round grey stones banded
with the truncated rainbow of geology

like miniature grey scale Jupiters,
or with cupric greens and ferrous pinks,
where veins of ore once infiltrated
layers of rock folded like dough
four hundred million years ago.

Further along, stones are larger again,
edges not yet worn away:
debris from winter storms.
The sea put its shoulder to the land
until it yielded, and there, an outcrop
from which a rock, still showing
a clean break, was cleaved recently:
the pieces still fit. In this mass
all fragments once met,
before waltzing with the sea
along the shore, losing the shape
that show they were joined, individuated
by forces that diminish them.

I place the pebble on the rock,
not to return it from exile to its source,
nor to commemorate my own presence
but simply to show that time exists,
for how else are we to make sense of this.