At The Foot of The Southern Cross: Seraph Lupus
{for those sacrificed to the Centaurs}


Just when we thought she would leave
as quietly as she came

April erupts –

      forgiving no one their trespasses,
      forgoing no one their shame.

      This year, Spring will have her vengeance
      and April, her mild daughter,
      plays a different game
      by different rules:

      there will be no flowers,
      no wreaths –
      only graves upturned
      by the great deluge.

      (No memorials, only showers
      for the chimeras and the wolves –
      the childhood angels hereby slaughtered.)

Yet we return to these images
year after year
sublimated,
verse after verse
submerged:

the lightning and the storm,
the flood and her aftermath:
menarche and afterbirth –

the beat and the tide,
the swamp amniotic

and the ocean, the tempest,
the overwhelming flow

the flow that contains us,
that comprises us,
that washes us away.

      Here, where new fictions erupted,
      were eviscerated, executed:

      here dead men wash ashore
      their rotten mouths awash
      with false prophesies,

      Satan consumes his own sword
      – another failed attempt
      to skirt the wrath of god,

      and the hypocrites in full attendance
      gorge themselves again
      at the feet of another antichrist.

Yet the torrent unleashed cannot dislodge
the possum sitting in her tree

or quench the thirst
of the burning ones crying
“Holy, holy, holy
He who was and is and is to come”

“And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of Him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man with unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen.”

      Yes,

      my eyes have seen.

      My eyes have seen.

     My eyes have seen.

05/06/2010

Author's Note: That quote is from Isaiah 6: 1-7

Posted on 05/06/2010
Copyright © 2025 Richard Paez