Please lend me thee a borrowed psalm
Of some kind of light
Leaking through an open palm
Where the wires bite
...
I've dug myself a chapel grave
Had to hammer down the sky that I couldn't save
If the iron keeps its name and time
I get to wear another face and call it mine
Find myself a smoking gate
Near-broken hymn to separate
That's what you get counting a name
In ****** mud where nameless came
I ride the spine of St. Kateryna's wheel
On a single spark
No hand to bless or heal me now
Just fire spun in dark
And in that gate an ember glows
A face half-seen, ash never goes
And this is what remains of men:
Husks, no breath, that pass again
At last the choosing comes
It always comes with thunder
Some keep their souls in jars
Some bury them down under
They bolt the bunker's mouth
Till lungs eat lime and plaster
The hills keep splitting wide
With every heart-beat faster
I'm old enough, friend
Too many Aprils bled to end
So take the mask
And wear the face that the war has given
Because you're finally hallowed, friend
I've watched the fields all turn to pain
Locusts flying, spun-glass and copper rain
Saw Kevlar saints sing marching by
And blood like Pascal wine along the plain
I saw a market bloom and flare
With wicker crates of green and morning prayer
Then Heaven stooped its iron head
Breaking the square, bits flying through the air
The saints came dressed in bleached-blonde white
With coins and carrots bright
Like altar gold
Then scarlet petals filled up the night
The bells of Easter all turned cold
A flame burns far behind my eyes for those
I couldn't keep from smoking stones
They whisper light like flutterbyes
Making homes inside my bones
And somewhere far behind the smoke
The candles still burn blue
For all the hands I used to hold
And cannot carry through
A veil, a bell, a springtime name,
Cathedral walls are whispering flame
And every shell that splits the night
Leaves another blight burned on my sight
I ride the spine of St. Kateryna's wheel
On a single spark
No hand to bless or heal me now
Just fire spun in dark
They taught us how to love
By teaching what to bury
The faces that we shove
The letters that we carry
We do not fire for hate
That acid drank us empty
We fire for sleeping homes
Where children yet breathe gently
We learned that wrath is putrid rain
That falls upon the heart
That brews it first
Dead men feel no other's pain
But hatred feeds the wound
And only makes it thirst
So now we hold the line
For sleeping rooms behind us
For schoolbooks, bread, and Icons,
For every hand that signed us
Not for the Orcs ahead
Who come in waves unending
But Kyiv's candles lit
Whose flames burn brave, unbending
And when the storm has passed
And silence floods the craters
Life tastes so fiercely sweet
It shames the wine of martyrs
A laugh erupts too loud
Guitars saw into plaster
Boot heel strikes spark from stone
And every joke comes faster
Because if not, you break
And fade into the aether
So dance with rifle, m8,
And laugh yet even faster
And in the moonless hours
The sky sings all electric
No-man’s-land stretched wide
To distances tyrannic
The angels now have rotor wings
And fibre nerves of lightning
Death descends from thirty miles
Silent and unblinking
I was once the patient eye
The stillness on the ridgeline
Now steel thinks for the hand
And ghosts decide the sightline
Old knight without his horse
I watch a new age gather
A trigger ten feet distant
And judgment made of data
Still somewhere in the din
Beyond the smoke and sorrow
A stubborn lark keeps singing
That dawn still comes tomorrow
I ride the spine of St. Kateryna's wheel
On a single spark
No hand to bless or heal me now
Just fire spun in dark
[Whisper-sung]
I ride the spine of St. Kateryna's wheel
On a single spark
No hand to bless or heal me now
Just fire spun in dark...
*