BALLAD

You lived in a tower of flawed glass.
All night it filled your head
with a high singing,
infinitely sustained
and infinitely 
painful

	Sloe-thorn grew in your garden
	in the shadow of high walls.
	Its black fruit lay on the winter paths
	as bitter and dry as cinders

You had a lover once
and his name was Death.
You wooed him, flattered him,
enticed him to your bed
and yet refused him, always,
the final liberty.
You said, "I will not go with Death.
He lives in a cold country.
I have been there and have seen God.
There was no grace in Him, no benediction.
God is a mountain of blue ice
shattered at the roots -
the coldest and most dreadful
object in the universe.

	The wind moaned at your high window.
	Under the garden wall the leaves
	were yellow, and the slow rains fell.

Death, deceived too often,
came in mountebank's disguise
to your chaste bed.
In his last incendiary embrace
you saw, behind the awful hollow
of his eyes, a blue and glittering
endlessly refracted light.

	The wind sings in the broken tower.
	Over your grey garden grey ash blows,
	and quiet as mercy falls the mythic snow.
	
- Eileen Kernaghan

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