Yes, To Give It All, To Ennoble The Calling

Yes, to give all, to ennoble the calling,
Suffer the anguish of the rising and falling
Of the unemblazoned stars, nameless heralds
Of the blood, mute hermits of our lost
Ancestral lines, the pain thresholds
Of our exits, less brash than the entrances
We made as if we’d been expected
All along. To realize the absurdity
Of our assent as merely the flowering
Of the smallest mirage in the vastness
Of the expanding starfields we disappear into
Like parachutes of milkweed back to their roots.

How sweet the whisper of life in our ear,
How insanely beautiful when the light
Unmasks the hidden night like a secret
It keeps to itself, shy in the shadows
With big eyes that take us in at a glance,
Strangers to the silence that astounds us
Like the sacred syllable of a mother tongue
That passes through us like the song of a bird
We haven’t heard in years. Is home near?
Is the river threading the eye of the sea?

Too much of the past in our greetings,
No future in our farewells, the moment
Before the first kiss stalls and the chance
Is lost in the widening wake of our regret.
The snake doesn’t ride the spiralling thermals
Of the hawk, a wavelength shy of transformation,
And the plumed serpent comes crashing
Like the aspiration of a kite to the ground.

Was it an act of God, or a fear of heights
That so much of the dead was left undone?
Brown stars of the spirit pressed like flowers
Between the preludes and epilogues
Of the delights that were fossilized
By the sedimentary layers of starmud
Transfixed like badges to the covers
Of our books in an unread cemetery
Where the wine bleeds a watercolour of rust
And the restless wind mourns our lack of ardour
In risking it all as if it were nothing
But a gust of stars kicked up by the wings
That bring us to heel in the shadow
Of the Beloved, intangibly, irrevocably,
Like a message from the gods we failed to deliver.