a speed-written poem by Jim Bellamy
After Communion (after Dylan Thomas's 'After the Funeral')
After communion, prayer blazes: staves, in a spinned shape of spheres, shuffle soundly down the toed taps of the dregs in the grave, blinded down the lids, with the wafer snapped,
And the spittled rotor, as wined-in as a knave, mourning the smacked stacks of the spade that digs deep, where the snakes of desolate dreams drum, in the dark droves of the coffin that sheds dry light
Over the raping bone, where the night lies dumbed by the routed thistle, and the feast of eden glides
And here I stand, for communial sake, atoned by the shrines of the owls that are red, with Jesus himself buried in the coal-black shades of the snivering, mastering naves whose babied churning turns the city ridgeward, (although for this city, the ridgeward world is dead).
And I, a prayer-booked rouser, command a place for the world I serve in service to its virtue; and the babblers scour, and the slick beginnings power a cell of knelling in the cipressed face
Of god in his pity combed, where the cantering fires lob along the palls and burn and briar, that this love of life may sing within the appled chapel of the non-concoted light
I know the heaving bosom of the sun that sings for awe; I know the moist religion of the lamps
That gutter in their music and grow young as time allows.
These shroud-clapped, abelled muses, this star-ensign storms now forever where the priesthoods drome
And struts god's love into a world of paradigm.
And the spittled rotor, as wined-in as a knave, mourning the smacked stacks of the spade that digs deep, where the snakes of desolate dreams drum, in the dark droves of the coffin that sheds dry light
Over the raping bone, where the night lies dumbed by the routed thistle, and the feast of eden glides
And here I stand, for communial sake, atoned by the shrines of the owls that are red, with Jesus himself buried in the coal-black shades of the snivering, mastering naves whose babied churning turns the city ridgeward, (although for this city, the ridgeward world is dead).
And I, a prayer-booked rouser, command a place for the world I serve in service to its virtue; and the babblers scour, and the slick beginnings power a cell of knelling in the cipressed face
Of god in his pity combed, where the cantering fires lob along the palls and burn and briar, that this love of life may sing within the appled chapel of the non-concoted light
I know the heaving bosom of the sun that sings for awe; I know the moist religion of the lamps
That gutter in their music and grow young as time allows.
These shroud-clapped, abelled muses, this star-ensign storms now forever where the priesthoods drome
And struts god's love into a world of paradigm.
..
copyright JDB 1999.
..
i write like this all of the time.