Old Ones  9/5/00

Death is a kind shoulder on which to sleep,
Waxing or waning,
Half full or half dark.
We speak of the origins of words
And pronounce a dead language
As though we were alive,
While the world flies on behind us.
How art thou, brown cow
A-jumping over the moon?
Oh how I await the 3-day moon
Which winks and sinks
To the window of my room
And trips like an elven lover to the bed
To kiss up my eyes, pronouncing me dead.
Our recent childhoods as long
As those of fairy children
Raised in elegant denial
Of the wheel behind the turn of seasons.
Our blood too old:
We who howl at the lampposts
In startled desperation,
And expect the tavern minstrel to play
An instrument of his own;
We who hear the storm a-coming
And take no shelter from the night
But that of old oaks and older oaths.
Within the fiery tempest
Death comes for the body,
Who rests her weary head
Upon the earth.
What, then, of the soul?

--Megan Morris, meikundayo@yahoo.com