Over the rooftops
When night came I rose and dissolved through the wall of my flat
and floated over the rooftops of the city, across the faintly
luminous band of the horizon, and into the world where the sun dies.
Forgetting myself I roamed forty days among pallid
smudges of hunger until I came upon one
brighter than the rest, who reclined in a honeyed song.
Drawn by that sweetness I hovered over her croon,
which seared my eyes blind when I knew it was not for me.
Angered I stung her womb and was slung in a web
of blood and desire where I grew on an infinite sea
of pressure and warmth until I cracked open the sky,
emerging into a place of rocky points
and gullies crazed with dry heat. The people I saw
in that land were born without skins and with fractured tongues,
so the tiniest nudge of the breathless atmosphere there
grated an arid squeal from their impotent mouths;
yet sometimes one was born who could speak, and his cries
of anguish maddened the others to tear him to death.
Leaving this desert of sterility and filth, I managed
to climb to a cleft on the mountain where a child was seated
weeping at his own severed heart that lay at his feet.
He told me, The wind is saying, the wind is saying;
and I listened to the wind but in its urgency
could not discover what message it had for me.
So intent was my concentration that I dissolved out of that world
and found myself floating back over the houses of the city of dawn
and into my room where I thought about these things, to tell them to you.
-- by Jon Corelis
originally published in The Poet's Voice (Bath)
To: BRITPOE([log in to unmask])
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