Poem XX - Gothic

In the midst of night, out on the moor,
shadows were stirring at my coming.

There, caught in the restless mourning wind,
the moon illumined all with its leering lidless eye.
With trepidation engendered and a weakness coming over me,

                        I set forth further into the dark.

Along my way I met, coldly, fiends of my past and present,
their hands lunging towards my neck; they were numberless,
        a ruthless swarm merciless in their onslaught.

But only one would I truly see:
              her cloaked spectre in the moonlit gloom, flitting within the mist.

Once upon a fadeless time I had her;
                                    she was rapt by the lavish love in which we lived.

    But our eldritch flame burnt too fiercely and we lost ourselves in the giddying decadence,
                                                 lost to time and its tendrils that took everything
                                                 slowly away.

Here in the wasteland
               nothing seemed truer, more honest and forthright,
than the bereavement I felt—
        than the dreariness pervading the heath and my soul.

M.M. — November MMX; Februarius, Maius–Iunius, September MMXI

Ex Tempore V / Aubade III

Lines written in an effusion aboard an early-morning train travelling from Glasgow to Carlisle on 15th September; "fulfilled and refined" after the experience.

I see a great fire!, there, to the east.
An amber-red glow with a latent immensity is slowly ascending.
The kingdom of deep, dark night is but a remnant,
its trace nearly subsumed in the fire and growing azure of the sky.

But now, before me: the mists rise over the pastures and rolling hills, and about the cold, silent trees.
Streams and creeks themselves seem to rise with the mist.
How thick it is, the incandescent lights of man shining so weakly within it.
—They come not even close to matching the fire's likeness!

In the distance: the kindling fire grows ever mightier!
And the clouds: they hail the coming of the imperial thing;
they are filled with an orange and red and—colour indescribable!, the very colour of Creation!

Is this Beauty?
Is that great fire and ancient thing also in me?

Here in this carriage do I feel the morning-chill outside that must eventually die?—in the greatest of births!
—the most fiery and most awful of advents!

The dull gold stretches now,
flung across the appearing firmament by the streaming clouds.
Surely this light is the herald of wonder—of all life—
recalling the earliest of days—earliest time—
when its rays struck the young earth and all those things that crawled or swam, which are long gone.
Those things rose in consequence of this fire that is now all-consuming and inexorable....

And at last!—the blinding rays break through the mist and clouds
and in triumph they parade!, displaying themselves so admirably.
The sky, the earth, the denizens below: they are now truly awakened.

At last! the Orb of eternal power, that I dare grasp and fit in my hand, begins its reign.
The Fire! the Light!—fierce, bright, beautiful!

Majesty Sun!, You are risen!

M.M. — September MMXI; edited September-October MMXI