CWYANNA DYR I -- THE EYRIE

       Stooped to a thousand misty marshes

       In the brackish dawns

       Before time started to unwind.
 
 

       The ancient aquiline brain finds it curious:

       You are so enchanted by the space between the stars

       That you must bring the void to ground and cloak yourselves

       In the charisma of desolation.
 
 

       We will introduce you to Our Lady of the Bitter Fog:

       Perhaps she can explicate the true import

       Of bereavement.
 

 

The crags remain only slightly seethed,

Discolored as by boiling time.

You have not succeeded in severing

Our bonds to the unpossessed,

Although grasses harbor little more

Than the offal of your immobile prey,

Themselves creatures beneath the dignity

Of all but the near-starving.
 
 

What is left of motion lies

In mirror-image owls and nightjars,

Vultures and long-scorned corviids,

Whose governance is less strict than ours:

We and the ravens are willed

To conclude a most unlikely peace,

On terms inimical by nature, but perhaps

The antidote to force majeure.
 
 

There are yet thunders and trumps to sound,

A great western rising of pegasids.

We too know the summoner king,

The cave, the seal;

You shall have your day in court

Upon these bluffs encircled,

Buffeted, bejudged,

Pierced; bedoomed, befallen.

 
CWYANNA DYR III - ENSEMBLE

Eagle's nest embowered,

Raindrops pool and roll;

Stone skipping

To a blackbird's call

Reed and sedge

Intercalate marsh and glade;

Flicker's flight from

Grub to fruit and

Home as night

and owls bestir;

Ospreys stitch molten sky

In enduring wild

Freefall, binding

Springs together.
 
 

How foolish those,

Wise by cerebration,

Who believe us void of reason

But make their revelry

By dancing out the pages

Of an older historicity

Intoned in other tongues.

Why use this blunted,

Ragged talon to claw

At your conscience?
 
 

Perhaps

Because once, at the end

Of body's dominion,

By the last tree on the last rock,

The poet sat silent beside

A strayed trumpeter swan

And formed the heart's mind

Into an image of home.

 

One is sometimes beguiled by the scent

Of sanctity incardinine,

Seeing purpose in blood spilled

To write the names of gods;
 
 

Drowsy memory must be waked by thunder

Before such wastage is seen to be

The spiritual onanism of crippled animae.
 
 

One might well be tempted to despoil

The mind-killers, were they not

Unclean even as carrion, palatable

Only to my brother, the malodorous sanitarian.
 
 

But I bequeath the mayhem-strewers, beneath

Every hint of wind, a skyward glance:

The prescience of vultures' wings.