Through the arched colonnade

Of brick and glass

The sky draped, a cotton sheet

Of Easter blue

Forgotten on some larger being’s

Laundry line

Shuddering in the silent breeze.

The light ran down the glass

In golden waterfalls

Pooled into a thick, caustic shadow

Beneath the greying elms

Hunched into their years 

Of watchkeeping

And whispering to their knees.

And where were you, reader,

When the first fingers of their minds

Crept up out of the wound of earth

And drank it in?

Can you see them now

As the growth of daily hopefulness

And hunger

Ten thousand minuscule adjustments

To the determining sun?

Decay is taunting them

Like frostbite, anathematizing

Their dragon-scaled limbs

One by one, chiding

There might have been

Much better ways to spend

A century of dawns.

It does not know

That deep into the wounded wells

Of light, the best of them

Resides, having died on purpose

Long ago, and sent this life

Ahead of them

And bides its time.