Standing upon these novel halls
The man, waiting
Seeks temperance and a kindness from God

He says,

"Give to me the gift of your knowledge and I will smite your enemy--rebuild the garden and replace those fruits long lost"

And his request echoes impotent through a voiceless hall

He cries, wails, churns and smashes
his dirtied knuckles on the walls

He yells, buckles, whines and sputters
Choked and lost in miserable,

The flanking rooms locked and dark
With constant voicing, gently call

"Who upon ye has the gall,
to name me Father"

And he is quiet.

------

In Moscow the Siberian fall grips the air
A wandering Dostoyevsky speaks in exhalations to the crack of gunshot in the dawn

A brief tightening of callous rope around his dry poetic throat

And at once his words sought to cull
the exquisite embers of furious retort

And he is silent.

----

The kindness of a failing city-state
Conveyed on the precipice of a bay
Jack teethed his frantic dharmas
And said to Them,

"What terminus of road
Would ever serve my unwinding soul?"

And as his gut trembled a final thought,
His eyes turned skyward, above the clouds

Where it was silent.

----

Dorigen, repenting the patient shores of tranquil sea
Accusing the chalk of its blackened soul
Traces the subtle dance of gulls
As their drowning feathers face these ageless things
whysper'd deep upon the winds

And she is Silent.

---

Basho, with a wanderer's grin
In solumn steps between the grains
Shades the path of unfamiliar road
And every poem steeped within

Where clouds are soft, where crickets sing
Past warbling stream with cadence grim
The Dao, leading ever onward

Says to him,

"Like water, do I rain."

---

Milton, his misted eyes
No light to guide their failed sight
Trace an ancient knowing glance
To Crown, his subtle circumstance

No soul in life
could see the might
Who gave this man his funeral rites

And when his words fall deaf at last
On his forgotten time and wishful past

He will stare deep into an inky void
And see
The stars for what they are:

Light, dispersed between the dark.

---

In the waning tide of Cresent lune
Twilight casts a gentle hue
Below the hill the city glows
The Palatine, gold and new

The ides, with consequence they come
And with them carry the will be done
Augustus' silent retinue of one
Notes a sky of draining sun

For Rome claws at all of Gaia's *******
And from sea to mount and desert dune
Ancient Africa, nascent Gaul
To Rome, will they forever fall

In darkness, the Palatine shadow loomed
Over web of flame-lit avenue

For the roads all led to Rome that night
For one small moment God guessed right

Cesar's legions on the fields of Mars
Clashed swords and drank to their Centurions
As an Era waited to see the dawn
And new blood to baptize the marbled Columns

And in the farms
beyond Rome,
The shepherds walked their sheep to rest
Where families returned to their homes
With stories of the day's parades and jests

And in the time
Between the days
When Rome slept and the crickets mated
The world was cast in velvet night
Lighted solely by constellation

And in that moment
God became
silent.
---