PORTAL

 

Footfalls fell silent before your menacing Beauty,

strangely sublime, a quiet silk glistening

as Lilith’s living skin fed on runes and blood.

How resolute you stand, a Fortlet

in desolate splendour, in remote self-abasement

as a warrior who too soon tasted

the bitterness of existence! You know no divinity

nor saint, nor are you a servitor;

you are your Master and Keeper, sweeping across

your dominion as a wingless Icarus

or grounded chiropteran, a revenant of mangled

obsidian and peat, these hues of the

primal passion that reduces man to his Elements,

awakening the Beast within.

 

You swell as a Storm, eclipsing your dwelling and

occulting every star. A wisp of a Moon

is your ally, a pale Chalice tipped over spilling

Blackness into Twilight, as the sapless wych elm,

its brittle branches everting

as a dragon’s maw, thirsts for a vapourous sliver

of the eternity between sleep and quietus.

Beneath your lintel, laughter lulls into

solemn sighing, words, into a crypt of whispers;

sparkling orbs dim to catacombs.

Are you unnamed or nameless? Are you a Moment

or an Aeon framed in Life or Death?

Would you rest as a Gravestone or lead as a Portal,

restrain as a Threshold or preserve as a Bound?

 

Grey mists rise to meet the Hour as grim invocations,

these mute calls to your ancient Peers.

Do you now sit in judgement of a wayward wight,

a mere arc within an infinite Spiral,

plotting a turn of the screw for one fated to tread

timeless spaces? A Sign from a Sky

traced my course to your tenebrous domain, for I was

born with a veil, fated to see beyond my sight;

I have lived and thriven in the realms of your Night

that wove its shades into the minutiae

of my being. I imbibed its miasma as your World

splintered into dark and darker,

darkening further, fragment enfolding ashen fragment,

even as you lurked in Creation’s shadows.

 

I communed with tomorrows as you devoured todays,

willing myself back to the Child I was

in my quest for deliverance. I saw a Morning blossom,

a garden of breaths and dreams; plumed throngs

and birdsong lifted the air; a Mind without a Memory

pulsed, chronicling the constant Now,

no more circumscribed by its forbears’ sorrowing.

A sallow gleam crept over your shoulder as a portent

of some unknown distemper. Did you quaver

or quail, great Overlord? Such shall remain beyond

my ken, for my Eye shone a violet Path

growing through Wonder into the balmy blue Horizon.

I discern you now, holding sway in a borderland,

diminished, yet aglow with new Reflection and Dawn.

 

© 2020 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

‘Portal’ thematises collective liminal spaces as depicted in BTS’s works  over the years.

In 2020, a year that seemed eternally liminal, humankind’s endless rite of passage, I hoped to portray the ambiguous relationship several might have to such spaces that at once liberate one and engross a part of one’s journey. One specific representation left an indelible impression on me - the red residue-encrusted white door frame in the ‘Interlude: Shadow’ MV. It seems a particularly poignant rendering of a painful truth: That which enables transition and bestows access to new environs also erodes both corpus and psyche.

The protagonist in this piece addresses the Portal, the doorway to a sumptuous dwelling, with a blend of awe, mystification and resentment. This emotional reckoning culminates in insight and compassion. I cherish the hope that humanity will eventually come to look upon these fraught times as gently.

Images: twitter.com (@BigHitEnt)