Hark! For it was upon one ghostly fallow eye,
That I, a silent messenger of the Lord, wept
Upon a waning hourglass. I’faith, I still bled where
The Son of God once lay, He who was driven
Into my illimitable bleeding heart; O warrior of
Golgotha – rhododendrons wailing – transcendent
Was the dawn. The impenitent realm, lost beyond
The wabe, Middle-earth besieged by pestiferous
Vapors most foul, a baneful miasma that exhumed
The blackened earth, ravaging all who were in
Cowardice slain; an obstreperous contagion that
Struck with neither pox nor boils, nor a burning
Quotidian fever, but with vampiric groaning, Cyclopes
Raging; a Stygian song that rent the sun, the stars,
The heart and mind of man. O whither have ye gone
O sons of Adam? Henceforth the children of the garden
Bathed in wicked green, turning their backs on the
Almighty and bowing before the Archfiend; whereupon
Wisdom, healing, love and knowledge – all were
Subsumed beneath the gilded wraithlike shroud – all
Were charter’d – sullied every one. The commodified
Country – inimitable spirits lost; the damsel drowning,
Floundering in her gold-lust – a sea of starless sighs –
The passing of mystic thanes. Anon the primordial
Ramparts were struck down by evil angels, who hacked
And hewed upon a nave thus spent; the swirling of
Sallow sands, beacons borne of a cruel meridian. And the
Lord gazed down upon that zone of gelid graves, whose
People were enchained betwixt a rock and scarlet sky;
To which I saw phantoms raining in inexorable anguish,
With gun runners and con men dancing in delight –
Banshies of avarice – they who raged at pallid moons –
Uncaged the demons of insensate night. And that was
How darkness engorged on all the world, as the fallen
Kissed the foot of the grinning baleful Fiend, with eyes
That burned like tallow, and remorseless wings that
Vanquished wolds of a cold dominion. Citadels cascading
Like deathly snow that clove the main; for the lambs
They were howling, unborn in callow tears – an evanescing
Of azure dreams – unmoored from the blessed light.
