Banquet and Moths
The banquet lamps quietly sink into stillness,
The light inside the black tent is like the sky—
Dim and swaying; the lamp's dark base is the colour
Of earth, turning up the faint candle-glow.
Emboldened with warm breezes, the buds appear. They are shy
And fatten from branches, long for leafy leaping of green.
But hold, at tip of stem and axil, a little longer with sacred ply
Of tight, grim perules and protect, from last gasping, obscene...
When the owl soars in the shadows of night
and black centipedes fall from the sky;
when the grey-footed stallion shines white
in the glow of Coyote’s fey cry...
Two months after leaders signed the official armistice amid the rubble of the capital, news came that we would leave the ford and return to the city garrison. The infantry were ecstatic.
