SOL INVICTUS

 

‘Invoice’ was the last word you

scrawled in your diary

that cruellest month, you Bell

wrought of Sun

sounded by a diamond tongue,

Comet-spirit blazing

into darkest nights of souls

breathing blooded prominences

of hope where stars lay prone.

Stilled, you burned still;

you said rest became you ill

and flamed untamed,

sparking, fulminating till that

most inexorable Tide

of all engulfed

your golden embers.

 

Vitals could neither measure nor

map your vital force

sparkling, purling, undiminished

through spacetime.

Red-vented bulbuls echo your

timbre; the Flame of the Forest

glows, glowers scarlet

through the monsoon’s vagaries.

I am locked into your lungs;

Air is now a shining thing,

streaming, shimmering

in unyielding jasmine clusters

budding like alveoli

this Solstice Day.

 

Rise into peace, father, my Light,

made forever gentle by

that last good night. Autumn’s child

shall somewhen take

your Eternal Summer

into her step. Her quill shall speak

in your voice.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Images: pinterest.com

References: The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas

BREATHE

 

Emptiness gained sentience;

Darkness blossomed sight.

The one roars in my still ear;

the other rages before

my sleeping eye.

Pictures begin to fade into

silence

scrawled across midnight

where Adhara’s hymn

to Infinity once rained silver

over jewelled verse

you read to a child who

yearned for home.

We looked up to the skies

to learn the ground

on which we stood, father.

A wan harp string

of moonlight

weeps into the under-sky

that is my world.

Black stars of pain stud

the cassias rising

…so unthinkingly pulmonary…

through the windless grey.

“I love you…”,

“Thank you, child…”,

you uttered, as air no more

lifted life.

Much speaks that never spoke

before…or am I

an awakened audient?

Do you now know

what language was before

tongues came to be?

Return to me, my father,

as a word that

breathes.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: Moonlight view from Hammershus ruins on the island of Bornholm

Artist: Georg Emil Libert

Source: commons.wikimedia.org