Watchtower Dreams

©  Steve King

All rights reserved

He would not think of death,

who stood the steady watch.

For the dark shapes

had slipped from the field,

campfires all decoys, they said:

no horse noise there,

bloodied bronze at last gone mute.

Dark emptiness as he gazed to sea:

a single entity,

the field and sky,

the great water;

a nothingness,

past the eye,

past touch and feel.

It guarded hope, that emptiness;

made light the fears,

as if to seal the well of enmity

from which the blood had run.

‘They are gone,’ he thought.

‘Gone.’

‘The sea take them.’

‘I fear the gods, extoll them all

from the shadowed depths to the great heights.

So let gods bicker as the least of us,

let them bedevil themselves as men,

but not ever here again.

‘I will have dawn,

the touch of my bride,

she of the perfume and infinite song,

she who smiles with a thousand eyes…’

‘But…,

            ‘What…wait…

‘No—’

A new poem for Imaginary Gardens…
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