The night counted backwards,
I saw the years flow like blood
under the white sky.
I sacrificed my guilt for dust.
The dust that moves us,
silently and waning like the moon.
And where should we find peace?
With the long dead, the kings
who sleep in the valley.
Their faces erased by ages of sand.
Torn and fluttering like paper,
in their tombs,
they hear the desecrators
who crush them with their breath.
And Rameses left his fable
for all to read, who knew
the emptiness of time.
"Come sleep in my garden,
the perfumed tombs,
the tumbled bones.
Come break the seals and read
your Fate,
eclipsed by destinies."
I could not see the light, blue
like a winter noon.
Dark as the death of pale hair
blooming on a pillow.
I passed it by,
I prophecied my life
with Chaldean lies.
The kings sleep rigid,
with their gilded masks.
They hear the voyages of worms
and caravans.
Centuries of midnights
grind them down.
The sungod and the son,
wait with onyx amulets
broken in their hands.
The voice that named us,
calling us by name,
but we were entrails in a jar,
and parchment where the beetles gnaw.
Night of shades, obsequies
where priests walk, chanting dreams.
Who tore out brain and teeth
and soul.
Gave you to Osiris
to weigh you up for gold.
I lie with you,
Oh Rameses,
father of the black hands.
The dark, it clings like silt.
like silt that washes Thebes
with the Nile.
It breeds upon me,
the silence that is lost
and paced before us in
an airless room.
They gave us eyes of myrrh
and kept us bending from the frost.
But my sweet brother weeps,
his ebony arms,
wet with tears.
"Pharoh", CBE, 1999
...Return to the Beginning...
