As something of an experiment, I thought I’d share a poem with you all.
To read a prose account of what inspired this poem, read my earlier post “A Tale of Two Churches”.
Vacío
Madrid! Bright hearse of empire.
Dressing down the centuries;
Que sueños antiguos
Que casas de nada.
On anaemic streets where
Lamplight sits as clouds
Garotte the sun,
Shapes of dark dimension
Find the eyes. Aggregate
Of mangled earth, thrust
In dour relief and Autumn weeps
All down his basalt chin.
In hoc signo vinces.
—
Silence overwrote the molten
Murmur of the road.
And though set in obsidious
Darkness, I saw
Dawn in golden vestments
Mount the walls.
It took my heart like an Aztec priest
And bore it up to the grey,
Frowning hull of the ceiling
Where it bathed, naked, in the light.
The choir of anonymised stone
Relenting disparate voices.
Letting be.
—
Cold, cold city! Hollow in every cell
Like the web of caged air
That floats on the cortado.
Emptied as the strutting shells
Beached at Poblenou.
This dogged masquerade
Limps on. How full
The cornucopia;
How many lifetimes
Spent in piling sand?
We resume this walk, this habit, guarded
For gaps in the pavement.
And even as I boil at the eyes
Thrown in falling
Teething in contraction,
Scattered out at sea and brainblindly
Stumbling for a word,
I will ache at the sinews,
Come back empty eyed
And await the silent sounding of the void.