Hold fast
at points of crisis
and those moments that swing in
unannounced and indented,
manfully bracing heart and head
with sullen aches and angry spurts of pain
(thicker than blood or mud) –
they won’t even leave their usual prints.
But the hours will turn
while the creases deepen
what emotions have brought in
unabridged, a semblance of universal dementia
artfully disguised in boredom, the slack tongue of the dead
swollen by age, decay, loamed earth and rain.
Deeper than this grave sod
however, the old bones like charcoal will light and scent
Each grave, apart.
Beneath the sleeping ones
whom time, like an ocean, has kept submerged and in,
unaltered fact hovers amongst metamorphoses, transcendent.
Awfully torn and mangled, awash in red
augers of stone, the salient matters remain
stronger than entropy or sin against God;
they won’t ever lose their first portent.