Final Prayer in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception II

In the end
we’d settle on paraphrase

Tongues prostrate, still, like sages
after a lifetime of silence

With our names abandoned in
the weight of our diviners

Our serial practise of voice
the unthinking

deep within us,
crescendos through space

ornaments in place of moon
and air

everywhere,
coming like a dawn, withheld

bursting, we descend
with the countdown of our rebirth

with the return of early spring birds
littering the sky, we

water, hunting ourselves through
a rare falling

– are prepared to know our defence,
keeping it locked when we have no use for it

how, at first, coming home to crayon’d walls,
strokes of pure spirit and bone of the ones
who drew them, now absent, makes us

mad. What we ought to have heard
in the warring voices fleeing the night
as we carried on our fleeting fall –

was the half-rumoured lilt of thunder
in the baby’s cry demanding plot
and reasons bigger than the guns
that stole us into a twilight we struggle
to understand.

– Ancient sages might have
spoken that same hyperkiller language
of dilating cervixes:

Labour is the early war, the one less feared
whose vaporous monotones of sorrow disappear too soon

And mothers – already overburdened by the fallout taxes of
some distant relative’s original sin,
in which free will was enacted and land was spared
and bestowed by a God wise enough to
keep distance between earth and sky

– ask: who’s duty now it is
to shed the need for things to come to blow?

That baldheaded anomaly in the
vulva’s hoist

packing up its mallets, beating its sandals
one-handed, breaking tears as it enters the world

whose flaking skin is the utopist shade of the galaxy…

And who cares for these fables that console
but not enough

when the room half full of cobaltous children
when the age of the singing bowl
when the puppetry, fugues of string
and votive, withhold warmth only long
enough for us to clock our times

and return home. To the bad seeds
who’ve sucked up nicknames like
bandit and colt and cockman,
germinated from their toddling days
in company of small hulks and rubber giraffes
like secrets packed away in the attic

These are the children
we tell bedtime stories
of our undying
love
of the silhouettes.

So while we go on and limit sorrow to money and arms,
that knock-of-the-sill and conscience, blanking
the source of our ebbing genealogies,

our anthologized dead
still touch everything,

numbering the stars and known universe
as we find ourselves still prostrate beneath
a sun still raging, before any of us even break
into the work of our absence in the memorial,

we have been conquered,
fingers still jagged from battle,
and we go on
and we age
into nocturne.