We are the anger of ten thousand nights,
The pride of pioneers leaps from our eyes;
Our hands shape the darkness into weapons,
Our footsteps fall on comfort without mercy.
We point our spears with dew, the blood of night;
Our faces shine like roses in the light.
We stir dark-laden leaves with eager breath,
We are coming, singing, from the silent heath,
We are singing, marching through the frozen grass.
We are tomorrow—stand aside and let us pass.
Very good that this torment should be
housed behind glass,
that the screams should be
sterilized in the antiseptic past.
And better that those who turned the screw
tighter and deeper
are the ones who were destined to lose
most by the deed.
But best of all that some men could stay
silent, not faltering,
and cheat dogma by laying their pain
on a most holy altar.
He was not, and has never been!
I made—and will unmake. Amen.
And not for any man of men
Do I now grieve.
I mourn a thought that I begin
To disbelieve.
For, oh! how beautiful and bright
My thought was!—that has taken flight,
And now is almost out of sight,
Dim in the distance—
Soon to be swallowed in the night
Of non-existence.
Thief of my sleep, the heartbreak clock
wakes me in Europe as the small hours crawl
westwards towards the Atlantic’s heave and fall.
Through the dark window I see their foreign stars.
The village I was born in is five thousand miles away.
One I loved lies buried in Africa.
Earth makes me smaller than a drop of memory
on the rim of an old man’s dream
before some unforetold and final dawn.
Two thousand years ago, somewhere Jesus was born
into a night like this. The heavens turn.
Earth grows colder as love recedes from us.
Your four dimensions in which my soul is lost
like a compass needle in a haystack of despair,
how shall I find my way to the love of the past?
Beyond the door I hear my daughter’s cry
in her baby sleep. Her mother lifts her head.
In the street below a soldier’s feet go by.
Wherever I turn the unquiet fears like rats
scutter across the night of the human heart.
Wherever I turn I meet the ghost goodbye.
Evil goodbye that will not let love live,
how shall I light the way through shame and sorrow
for the love of today and the innocent love of tomorrow?
Here I lie in the night, a homeless one,
ready to suffer, for love’s sake willing to give
all I can claim for myself, or am, or have.
My baby cries and my sweetheart lifts her head.
And tomorrow lies in wait with the morning paper
and a headline that will stab all kindness dead.
Softly, gladly through this one night’s grace
I am gone, to the moments returned
when eloquence embraced wordlessness
in the leaf whisper fathering of one more loss
and thrush nest warmth already contained
the first frail feather thought of autumn,
this hushed moon and memory ghosted time.
This slow season of falling and fading,
of ripeness, decay and remembrance
amid the mists of a year’s conscience,
I walk again the mossed ways of loving:
softly, gladly through this one night’s grace,
this hushed moon and memory ghosted time.