This poem was distributed in July 2020 in the second edition of the letter series, Raven Mail.

 

THE PROPHET & THE GIRL

A bright hot day by a sunburnt sky,
a dust-choked prophet
in a ghost-wracked street
stepped on a soapbox stand & cried:
“The Sun King’s soon to die.”

And as he hollered of the fall of the king,
nobody gathered at his soapbox stand
but the watchmen came
& they clipped his wings
& trussed his beak with a bullring.

They left him bound
in the dust-choked street
muzzled & bound & left to die,
so he scraped in the dust
with his road-wrecked feet:
“It’s the Sun King’s last defeat.”

But the night winds ravaged
the work of his claws
& the dawn dogs hovered
by his death-marked side,
so he sketched his last words
with the last of his force
in the blood that leaked
from his ring-trussed jaws.

The dawn dogs howled
by the blood-soaked ground.
A young girl followed
that ghost-wracked sound
& these are the blood-red words she found:
“The Sun King’s dead, girl
– take his crown.”

So a prophet dies at a watchman’s hand.
The Sun King plummets to the desert sand.
By a sunless sky in a bright hot land,
a young girl takes to the soapbox stand.

Berlin-Wedding, July 2020

 

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