Crumbs From the King’s Table [ Poems from GHOSTS ]

Once I moved myself aside

there was a crystalline quality to the air

and stillness
 

and memories of music heard
birds who sung
leaves who had fallen, decomposed, damp and wanting
merged and grown anew  

in the seed cells of the lighted soil underfoot.

There was a sloshing of water into itself

wave into sweet wave,
a dive off the ship of dreams
into blueback ether
roiling          like a conjured hurricane.

The world: burning and true like their hearts

had splintered.
 

Into the breach!   I heard myself cry.

In it cars filled highways
commerce choked streets
wariness lined leisure

no peace
in a blink
a breath
a meeting of the eye in its mirror,
nanosecond recognition:
 

god
 

in
 

self
 

then, everything after:
fire
famine
flood

a great shaking of the land
smoke collecting in its atmosphere
trapped behind the glass of a bauble,
the jewel in the eye of the goddess,
her queendom fallen
and palace long abandoned

to vine and ruin.

She, too, gone --
grown finally impatient with their intolerance
of softness and season
the chessboard divisions of her vastness
fiefdoms,
hearts,
numbered days, all.
 

On Sunday the rains came. On Monday they drowned. Beneath the sea she left only one stone, marked with her message:

No longer shall hate fill breath.
No longer shall wounds bleed.
No longer shall bones ache.
No longer shall I accept crumbs from the king’s table.
The new age dawns if they hear it or do not. Let their eyes see.
Truth: be told, and embolden the brave.