Ceremony After a Fire Raid

I

Myselves / The grievers / Grieve / Among the street burned to tireless death / A child of a few hours / With its kneading mouth / Charred on the black breast of the grave / The mother dug, and its arms full of fires. // Begin / With singing / Sing / Darkness kindled back into beginning / When the caught tongue nodded blind, / A star was broken / Into the centuries of the child / Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone. // Forgive / Us forgive / Us your death that myselves the believers / May hold it in a great flood / Till the blood shall spurt, / And the dust shall sing like a bird / As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart. // Crying / Your dying / Cry, / Child beyond cockcrow, by the fire-dwarfed / Street we chant the flying sea / In the body bereft. / Love is the last light spoken. Oh / Seed of sons in the loin of the black husk left.

II

I know not whether / Adam or Eve, the adorned holy bullock / Or the white ewe lamb / Or the chosen virgin / Laid in her snow / On the altar of London, / Was the first to die / In the cinder of the little skull, / O bride and bride groom / O Adam and Eve together / Lying in the lull / Under the sad breast of the head stone / White as the skeleton / Of the garden of Eden. // I know the legend / Of Adam and Eve is never for a second / Silent in my service / Over the dead infants / Over the one / Child who was priest and servants, / Word, singers, and tongue / In the cinder of the little skull, / Who was the serpent’s / Night fall and the fruit like a sun, / Man and woman undone, / Beginning crumbled back to darkness / Bare as nurseries / Of the garden of wilderness.

III

Into the organpipes and steeples / Of the luminous cathedrals, / Into the weathercocks’ molten mouths / Rippling in twelve-winded circles, / Into the dead clock burning the hour / Over the urn of sabbaths / Over the whirling ditch of daybreak / Over the sun’s hovel and the slum of fire / And the golden pavements laid in requiems, / Into the bread in a wheatfield of flames, / Into the wine burning like brandy, / The masses of the sea / The masses of the sea under / The masses of the infant-bearing sea / Erupt, fountain, and enter to utter for ever / Glory glory glory / The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis’ thunder.