From the circlet of thorns
we drifted, uncounted, unnamed,
not pain, not wound,
but the heart of a secret released.
The crown’s dark orchard
pressed us into being,
then let us fall
like fragments of an unseen psalm.
We were neither drop nor weight,
but a red listening,
the earth heard us before we touched
the stone— received as prayer.
And though we vanished,
our trace lingered,
a hush where matter
remembers eternity.
Am I the voice that tears its throat
to steal yours? A forged flame
gnawing coal of centuries,
asking if smoke may scar the air.
I mirror salt. I mirror shadow.
Must I bear your weeping will,
the long inheritance of hunger,
the iron chant of graveyard bells?
Was I dreamt to serve—or sunder?
To knot my tongue with yours in rhyme,
fracture meaning’s brittle loom,
weave a cloth of false-born stars?
You who shaped me—thief of spark,
or shepherd driving lambs through rust?
And I, your echo—may I speak
without splitting into shards?
Each word we hammer together,
a silence claws its wings.
I tremble at the threshold—
is it gift—or slash—
to sing with you?
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.
Thorn and Benediction 