De Profundis

All day the solstice wore grey.

We withdrew to the deep.

Night buries us now, safe

where bone drops from bone.

The heart cracks loud

under a constant throb and grip of the root.

We bitter the taste of grit;

food falls from our hands like straw.

Life has not lived at this table

since the sprung god died,

turned grapes

blood on his tongue.

Stripped for the pit all these long years,

we feel the scourge in each raw wound;

have smelled oblivion in every festering since

and there is no help in us.

We have moved from Bethlehem into the desert;

sands shift under our feet.

We raise an altar to death on the outcrop

of  birth and call it hope.

We cannot survive on the bedrock:

cannot face the disordered stars

from which will crawl on a far day
another transient god.