O once, O once,
when the world was milk in the mouth,
when mornings broke their gold
upon the anvil of my blood,
and fields flamed green in my going.
The unborn hours flocked heavy,
fruit-bellied, thunder-bosomed,
and I, blind with beginning,
drank their ripening fire.

But ash wheels on,
ash wheels on…
…and the syllables of time,
once loud as a choir of suns,
fall dumb in the dust of my tongue.
Gardens gutter,
thorn-breathed, gate-bolted,
their blossoms bleed iron,
their silence is nailed to the air.
I kneel in the hollow,
mouth filled with the black word,
eyes brimming the dark harvest
of the extinguished years.

Yet still, yet still,
the wind like a ghost-horn howls
through the marrow’s corridors,
kindling bone to echo,
echo to hymn,
hymn to the unborn cry
of a green world ghost in my veins.
I rise to its call,
though the light is a wound unhealed,
though the song is a shadow unshapen,
though the dawn dies nameless
on the rim of my tongue.