To See the Day
An Excerpted Poem from my coming collection, "Songs of the East"
The heat of vanished suns is summoned by the spark lit by human hand yesterday. Two black shadows, like fallen towers are cast into the night by spark’s son. They stare past each other, past cold eyes seen much by the other before now. Behind them the wind flaps through a tent over two empty beds and a stove. One asks the other in rasping voice, “How long we gonna set here and stare?” The other says in a hollow tone, “Until you lay down in that fire there.” The rasper spits and darkens the dirt, dip the darkener of damp dour mud. He’s wearing a brown hat stained by sweat, which would shade from the sun but it’s night. “Why do you think Jesus put us here? instead of sending us on ahead?” “Unlike the others we ain’t dead and we’re nowhere closer to dying now.” The hollow man was missing a leg, his irises were flat like a pool. “No, that ain’t it I perhaps reckon.” the rasper said turning an eye up. “What you reckon don’t matter a spit.” said hollow legless beard wearing man. The rasper shook his head and grabbed his hat to show locks of dark curly blond. “I think you know something and you ain’t telling cause you forgot how to tell.” The hollow legless bearded balding man with iris-pools met the eye. “I think you’re the reason we’re set here just before dawn and it never comes.” The rasper spat again and the ground got a bit dip darker than before. “No you can’t tell nothing even if you wanted to tell the whole wide world.” “I hate you. I always hated you. from the day I was born I hate you.” “There ain’t no ‘you’ to hate me no more, if there ever was from the damn start– You’re the face of a scarecrow twisted by wind and you ain’t no man to hate. You’re the salt pillar beneath your waves, the sandcastle on your beach; melting ice. You weren’t no man to hate me, no sir. You were an avalanche of dead souls– You were the damndest act of God like a twister or a flood and no more. You hollow man who made yourself a hollow man to call up enough force– Enough stuff singing down a mountain to move me out my woods and my fields– You were a mass of men more dead than niggers stink to high hell or a fly– And I know you can’t say a damned thing save cursing and vexes to a man. Your end ain’t your beginning cause you never had a start we did different. We is. You ain’t. But the big pile of proverbial shit that sits heavy– No that won’t be cleared in a day or two or six months or a year. But I’ll rise. You won’t.” The hollow man faded out into the shadow that wasn’t his. The sun broke and the rasper set to breaking camp cause the Lord was waiting.