- A Natural Apostasy
A time when the light falls clearly
A place where the struggle began
She awoke to take back her realm
And expunge the virus infecting man
A natural apostasy
Burn away the creed of frail minds
- Countless Skies
Countless times below me
Rivers rose and fell
Ageless stones eroding out
Across the endless swell
Songs to pave the seasons
Wounds to follow birth
Cries to carry through the night
- Foothold
Oh
The ridge had long hinted
At strong and at weak
Both threatening wall
And welcoming peak
A taunting horizon
For shortening years
- From Scythe to Sceptre
I knew you some years before
Deep in prayer under bough
Futile sighs in vital skin
Your flesh caressed by night
Yet change came quickly
A bruise in the air, it staggered within
Sweet sickly rot
- Held in Hollows
Through tainted mass
A scourge unseen
Brought three winters forth
And set between
After these hundreds of years
The embers and fate will collide
Her rotten heart has burst
- Hidden Window
The mountain kept a trove inside,
That was known only to the three -
Closest friends now that their greed
Had burdened them with things to hide.
The entrance was a hidden window -
Punctured through a narrow vein,
To crawl inside as light would wane,
- In Parting
After one but before the next,
In a tree where new life writhed and flexed
Two birds emerged to hold the world
And grow from feeble talons curled
But fate see them part that day
As lightning cut their branch away
By winds to distant places sent
- Locus
Sunrise, sunset, throes of time -
Then a thousand more
Nightfall, daybreak, causes bind
Now, again, before
Pushed above colliding giants
Into air that roared
Forgotten fragments scarred my face
- Much More Was Lost
In gleaming morning sun we ran
Each day the day it all began
A flare was lit between the worlds we wandered
We bounded over broken log
Across the steppe, beyond the fog
To life in tiny fragments all felt bonded
By chance one noon we saw someone
- Neither Shape Nor Shadow
In the space of one night’s darkness
They have gathered, somehow drawn
To where sand and water meet
To the place where nature mourns
An army of one thousand souls
Moved not by force of law
But by an end of which they dreamt
- Outlive the Hand
In death she spoke of waiting
Her final days were long
These fields have changed since last she wept
Before the silent throng
She sits where childhood memories lie
Above, beside, within them
The carvings have outlived the hand
- Remnants
Embedded in fertile plain
Snared in pulp and stone
Confounded being emerges
Surrounded yet alone
Surging growth in vigour
Morbidity at bay
Hale deceives the advent
- Sanguinary
The purile form the weakened mind
The pools that linger in our wake
Compelled to act, yet not to think
These are the lambs that will surely fall
Borne out of fire, a new regime
A beacon for the ancient gods
Their empire crumbled into ash
- Sun's Delusion
Descending through thickened mist
An old man reached inside and tore out my slumber
Ivory twists an open claw
Set upon the skulls of man
Formative years aside
Truth blanched in sun's delusion
But providence affirmed
- The Desolation of Ares
The scene where the battle took place
Now only whispers of that war remain
Through fen damp and glade deep
Crept the fog which was their bane
Harkee the pain
Welcome your death and the silence it makes
As foe cleaves foe in the dawn
- The Dream and the Waking
Silent but distant,
Real but not seen
Here but not happening,
Forever has been
Into this absence,
Two had but strayed
Retracing in circles,
- Valence
As his hands threw the net,
His mind drifted away.
Fragments of voices, faces, words yet
Each, having passed, was like a dream,
Leaving echoes that brought others to life.
A churning current carried him along,
And barely noticing them writhe,
- Venator
As I skulked past the gates
And drew behind the stones
The winding trees enveloped
The cloak around my bones
Peering through the night''s mist
I crept through the fen
To try and find the totem
- Withering Strands
Far from the Sun
And that frantic dash
Billions before it,
To Earth, had crashed
But in this expanse
Where huge trees unraveled
A new plant was struggling