They all stepped out to lament the waking,
taking with them their ash, sashes and sack cloth.
Tears welled and all wailed
As the failing ships sailed slowly back up the river.
Blood strewn and empty
with the impaled heads of their hither sons tethered to the masts
These same sons who’d ventured onto a summers dream
and bound up the stream into winter’s song:
Sailing on under the raising bridge on calm waters,
Implacably past the cascading reams of
Sorrow filled figurines who seamlessly formed the procession.
Long gone were the cheers that bade these thanes farewell,
The scene of pristine flowers felled
and placed into the swell that welcomed,
as with the loud bells, their entrance into the dream.
Debonair and scent-clean,
the affair had marked the beginning of this spent dream.
Awake, the scent beams of rotten schemes,
The boats creak as besotted eves glean from the distorting winds reasons to weep.
Death, as with the rain, had poured his seems upon the embers of the nights ignite.
No knights tonight from these ships alight.
And the city weeps that once in daylight did in sleep delight.
© Denis Adide 2011
Waking
I wrote this piece after thinking on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It speaks about the dream of, as well as the cost of, conquest.
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