Sepulchre Sestina

There was no need for applause, the preacher’s hall filled with silence.

As if rain along the inner walls and gales kissing concrete weren’t enough for a day gone dark,

As if the lies calculated and whispered on a dove’s wing weren’t enough to hurt the Self,

As if, somehow, the rhyme could drag on through that alabaster time,

The faint calls of the surface hinting at something above-- music?

Combined with those combed words of Mephistopheles, it made tears,

Almost acidic against the neutral floor, staining alike the cheeks of adult and child.

At the end, there was a cry which could have only come from a child,

“Sir! Sir!” At which there was only the encouragement of silence.

She couldn’t have been over ten, face glass webbed with the reflection of a tear,

She shifted and rather absurdly called out that there goes the dark,

That nothing deserved to be heard in this hall of sadness, least of all that beautiful music.

“What music?” asked the preacher, with none so uncertain as him-self.

To which, she quipped, ignorance wasn’t a mere crime against the self,

But to be ignorant of such melody-- this was unthinkable to a child,

Surely, that was an offense against some greater God, to ruin such music

With your own perception of beauty, a perception full of tombs and silence,

Ears full of a viscous pitch, deep and as dark

As the darkness one claimed to combat; with such a declaration came another tear.

And as the Hieromonk snickered at the madness, there came, from his clothing, a tear--

Some small thread, half as wide as a silkworm’s treasure, came undone by it-self.

With this, the preacher’s face grew stormy and dark,

Some God, somewhere, was testing him with this child,

And this damned thread! As his robe came undone, the audience could only hold their silence,

Alas, by a miracle, they managed to hear at last the sweet, innocent music.

It oscillated between an angel’s cry and the sound of the inner psyche, this music,

With each adding their own to its harmonies; soon the holy cave was yet again stained with tears.

So-called “holy” for the preacher and not the God; no, that was a Luciferian silence

Which fell over the men of the preacher’s sepulchre, a place where eternity stopped for time,

Where the only one who was pure, who could hope to rid it of the savior’s fever, was this child.

For it took something more than a man to match his own devils, to beat his own in the dark.

At long last, a singular ichor ray through the dark.

The sermon was over with the rise of the morning star, yet the music only grew stronger,

Sweet, sweet liquor of Perseus! Fed by the ambrosia, all were emboldened by this child,

Perhaps, they thought, perhaps we can be rid of this infection, brazenly fed to us by a tear

In our sides; with this thought, came aches of dozens of bleeding scars, un-healed by time,

A black line of benign necrosis outlining hearts and ribs-- an epidemic of conforming silence.

But the night is holy, no, the only evil of the dark is the evil we put into it through our tears,

We may not see, but we can hear still music of the lyres, transcendent of time,

In the wonders of nature, let us all be children of our deities: let us never be made evil by silence.