The earth sobbed torrents
All night long --
The earth throbbed, ebb and tumult:
And now it rests beneath the silence
After screaming --
Now it nestles in the rubble,
In the echo,
In the echo of their drowning.
Indifference, aqueous and plain,
Would beat the barren
Into soil
Given time, ebb and tumult:
Now it flees as though a memory,
Wraith, and ghastly.
Triumph tolls unto the Victor --
Vile, vociferous are those intangible chimes;
They hang in heaven --
With the wind they sometimes go,
A lone survivor of the torrents
Of the silences,
The echo
Of the echo of their fortune.
Dew drops bleed into the grass;
Shards of rain-flesh shed the ground
Of whitely stillness: --
“Thank the earth,” those chimes would whisper. “Thank the earth:
It gives you strength, it gives you hope, it gives you life.”
I look to the carnages of an ambiguous kind of war
The carpets of the earth now have to wear:
It smells faintly of tears.