She
By: A Byrd Called Bird
Wheeling in a chaos-scape
She flutters down the winding street
Slipping between the empty people,
Before she turns
Like the hand bursting from the lake
Crowning clouds with glittering diadems of frozen pearls
Bedecking them in the manner of dancing girls
The chilling burst of water gifts the sky with ice
Delivering temporary diamonds to novel homes
With the purpose and the force
Behind its gift:
A sword forged in paradise.
You realise
She occupies another plane, distantly removed from us
As we wander pre-ordained patterns
Through tangled mires of ruddy wire
Covered in a bloody dust.
From afar she can simply see
The soaking, shivering wracking pain
That races through.
Festering in a healed and bleeding wound
Gathered in a screaming crowd ‘round gaps
Where loved ones no more fall
As drops of water in the pouring rain.
You’d think she’d beg in a thundering voice of power,
To hit the brakes, to spare a life.
You’d think she’d care and send a cresting wave
Shaking the ground and marking the hour
So we are written anew.
Of course, you would, because you’re you.
But live her life and soon you’d find
People deaf and blind to the wider world,
So closed are they inside their own
Cavernous valleys of seclusion, echoing sunless,
They disregard the gift of wisdom
Manufactured in her alien mind.
So,
You see her turn and see her wait
Peacefully entrapped in her chaos-scape,
Then walk away, in the gliding gait
Of one who saw the hand
As it rose up from the lake.
One who smelled the honey dew upon the air
But one who’s mind, so mired in fear,
Is lost to her. Who dare not walk the paths alone,
Who dare not brave the cracking ice,
And face the maiden from below,
Whose hand outstretched and silky white,
Offers a prize so dear
As a sword forged in paradise.
But a winter mirror is all that stands
Over a crystalline surface, empty and bare.
A lake that, shuddering down to blood-blue depths,
Jails the water, sentient and fathomless,
With a treasure, delicate and rare.
For the blade now rests far below its sheath of cracking ice,
And even should another come to brave the lake
And face the lonely ways others feared,
They will find no Lady and no kingmaker here.
Just the fading memory
Of a sword forged in paradise.
And the Lady?
She has departed her roof of ice
To dwell in a summer world,
For why need she to brave the bitter cold
In the vain and unfulfilling hope
In the mythic cycles of forgotten Gods
And heroes old.
Trading in her empty world of lonely white,
The Lady has absconded to paradise.