When Time Turns All To Dust, Red Like The Wounding Sea Poem by Orin MSH

When I was leech upon the dew, under the moon and mist
When time turns all to dust, red like the wounding sea
The stars were drifting through the clouds
Of hail and sleet and soot
The very Time that forged our being,
With iron and silver, trembling in the earth;
Crushes fawns and beasts in their clamoring revolt
The mighty destroyer knocked down hard,
Sudden, I was in the whispering boughs
For I am the lord of fruit trees, Sedges & Thorns
Trailing with Cloves, Nutmeg & Cinnamon
Down the cascade of wind and surf

And I was crickets and cicadas, in the easeful field
Of childhood, loud with songs of hey-dayed ditties
Smelt of rain-pelt grass, our sylvan deities
In the gleaming age-old harvest
And I was let out from the granaries
To frolic in the weed of my own greeneries
All that emerald was burning, the sapphire was turning
All insects of the sea, all beasts with the unholy
And the bell tolled ghostly
In the cathedral of the sky.

The night was long with taunting fishes,
And whales whistle through their blowholes
To the grassy field sprawling with lush trolling trees
Their leaves were bait, their fruits were lures
Plump with pink seedless flesh
And day became ever abhorred
Letting us breathe only through murk of water
When I came home, the barn was chattering
All the dark of day and clear of night, drew me
Close to the weather of a dull heart
In this dumb age, an aching climate

As one was held in pangs of hunger
To draw out luck from tumbledown bedrooms,
An heirloom of tongues with speech of fire and cursing
Down the rickety corridors, an old patriarch was singing
The tale of faeries inherited from ageless gabbing loon
On our cold breasts, shines bright the moon
Ancient stars gather in the blotted sky
The sun was bright no longer the louder we sigh
It was scribed in tawdry prose and thwarted verses
In the wasteland we call poetry, the wingless Pegasus
Shall soar from the whickering barn
Through meads of wild unknown

And cherished by the fruit flies and maggots, oozing decay
Under the green sheets, the rain drowsed day
In the centre of a nebula, caressed by water
Ticks and worms cut through old flesh
Revealing all along the nascent and nacreous
With splendors revolving in an orbit at His behest
The motes and dusts we once adored
were spun in shadows
Of eyes contemplating light before they shimmer and show
The glum outline of sorrow, the vapid shapes of woe
Before the writhing Death, a life given to loathing
The child in the blood-sapping womb
Unwoven in the shaping loom.

As I was in my kingdom of nickels and dimes
Formed in the trickle of mud, an edifice
Dim moonless eyes that could not shine,
Enfolded in the darkness of sleep
You could hear the children cry and weep
In the vast heaven of tumult and mercies
As I was in the folly of the faulted unwise
The dream is heavy, shut-out and dries
As we carve out our names on the gushing waves
When I was grub upon the leaves, below the painted skies
Then time turns all we love to rust, in dark vermillion seas

When I was thorn upon the screw pines, bathed in dew
Until the mildew spread out like fire,
its canker-green and milky residue
The stars aloft were still nebulous seeds adrift
Through shapeless smokes and burning clouds
Choked with such rancor and rancid desires
With red and yellow, these verses read aloud
Blotting out vast wilderness, removing it entire
When I was honey upon their grieves,
below the blanked-out skies
Thus time turns all we are to dust,
our lust fades in to lies.


(Orin Marlais Keat,2nd August 2022)