Safron Thread
White mounds and baby teeth are found in a living medieval fortress.
Dust that never quite settles as triangular orange flags flitter in the warm night air.
She disembowels the Chinese lock with the swiftness of familiarity
The same contraption I had fumbled over with foreign fingers
I am released into the silence of the night.
Trapped within these walls, free to leave, only to find new masonry erected by busy hands On the outskirts.
As though to halt one?
I shall build my bailey here, a turret to guard me from the past.
Freshly ploughed earth, smoky tendrils, and the minutiae of a cow’s pilgrimage to slightly longer grass.
These will outlive and outgrow the molars inside my tower.
Home now, well, a temporary home,
Like the lips, curtains that open and close to smile or cry
Only to decay as the century-old red curtains in a theatre, moth-eaten by time
The jawbone is a proscenium arch to an empty show of darkness.
Tiny cotton thread of orange in my beard
Like saffron
Recalls the Viking warriors that terrorised my ancestors, copulated and now,
Now living on my face.
Their civilisation has collapsed, but the trauma remains deep inside.
I carry that dream of terror with an exotic thirst for Trojan destruction
She waves or ushers away from a distance,
The only dim light
The moon reflects in her eyes
Tiny pieces of chalk,
Dust. The wheels rattle on the uneven road
With a broken rhythm
The sea will bear the ships that are inevitably coming.
The tridents of war.
Laid to rest on my tea leaves
An ancient city,
in an ancient land, raised to what it once was.
Spit out the brown liquid
And see how it makes intercourse with the puddled earth below.
Tis where we cameth;
Tis where we will returneth.
The scent of the earth never leaves the nostrils.