the hunt
When the light fades, the wounded heart bathes in deaths glorious shards of fire. …seconds shift the circuit further into the furious intensity of existence where moments of joy flee to unknown sanctuaries/ we know not the grief of age worn sorrow, ground as dust amidst despair’s own tomb – yet hope flutters upon the honeyed breath of resurrection/ gnarled fingers clutch the withered vine, clawing the earth beneath/ yet above, the unyielding sun burns fragments of a dream now lost into the arrid earth, each step falls upon, another without sound, without trace of all being/ I pass into fugue, a solitude of mourning/ but for what? whence did joy depart, whence did melancholia dampen all vigour into grey vapour/ restriction suffocates me, expression is denied…until
YOU,
YOU
entered my soul chilling and burning it ablaze with all wonder, with awe, with fear, my greatest need is for
YOU
never to depart, lest it shatter into oblivion….gather me whole again, gather me home, come, embrace me again/ the velvet shadows beckon me to thee, engulfed, muffled in the whispered sighs of our expirated prayers… but then, our howlings drone into the void around us, as, swirling out of time and space, we assume the mantle of virtue, the orb of justice and the scepter of fate – drifting across the spiral star scape, eternity is too short/ ambiguous , I am invincible beyond the threshold of promise; my savour’d draft of honey is manna most fair to a deed – a gift twixt lovers, whose troth is meet! Seal my lips with unbridled passion/salvage us where all bundles become en-lightened ….here I dream myself true … the hunt is spent!
text copyright of shani oates
1 perseus and medusa by E.C. Burne-Jones
2 hope in the prison of despair by evelyn de morgan
People of Goda, the Clan of Tubal Cain 