Leo Yankevich
RACKED BEAUTY
Blest be the dawn, the luminous blue-slate,
The arch transfused by the glorious sun,
And blackbirds chanting hymnals in prickly bushes,
And rooks high over fields coughing up love.
Blest be the winds about the furrowed brow,
And the joyful whispers of dying leaves,
The maples staggered blissfully behind barbed fences
Above the tombs of the newly redeemed.
Blest be pain that comes like a stark beggar,
The thorn-tree that has its roots in a star,
The sweet massacred gourds tethered to the rusting gate,
The apples heaped on the agonised floor.
AFTER HIERONYMUS BOSCH
The day exits through dusk, the sun on hills
Angry at its going. Briar and brush,
In death, like spring against the twill of fields,
Through limbs and leaves amid hunger and hush,
Obey the wind on whims of winter's will.
Old men sigh in the shade; God wags his beard;
And like a Judas goat before the kill,
Time buries its head in the wake of fear.
The moon hangs in the lull; the blinding spears
Blunt the eclipse above the pyramid;
Mummies rise in the mind; fey frozen tears
Blaze like beacons above the boiling lid.
In the light: soul hugs the eternal now—
Redeemed—not knowing when or why or how...
THE EXIT
The heart would heal, blood not sour in the veins,
The philosopher's cave not dim in the skull,
The body rise—and in the light—forget its pains,
The once mad apes—freed by the glorious wall.
And all would climb—the miraculous ladder,
Eyes burning—behind mirrors,—and in the sun:
See Your face—ineffable—but much sadder,
Wrestling with what God for whose will to be done?
MERCY
The hour the mice climb out of the walls
Is rancid joy, a bitter, bitter truth.
There is no crucifix wrapped round his thumb,
Only paroxysms, otherworldly
Thirst, and an inaudible psalm bleeding.
In the well of a flagon he beholds
White horses, the spleenish ghosts of the drowned
Rising through the dregs. And only the sun
On the sallow roof reminds him of time
Circling a contradictory globe.
Verily, he is at the blue threshold
Where the lamp's affixed to eternity
And light pours down on an afflicted child
Through the skeleton of a trembling leaf.
THE BELL-TOLLER
The final leaf falls on the eve of his birthday,
And a dying man coughs in the wake of his prayers.
Remind him, rumour of the sun, this cloudy day:
His breath's a boon on the banister, up the stairs,
And his falling lungs a temple of holy airs
At the thorny altar he climbs along the way.
In the chapel of hushed hymns and grave mysteries
Let him not kneel to weep before his gasping words,
Nor die forsaken in a desert of parched seas,
But have him toll love in the belfry with the birds.
Greeted by it, may Gabriel touch and heal his hurt
And his ecstatic heart spurt its epiphanies.
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