Epiphany
by Robert de Beaugrande
Long since I braved in unframed glazed amazement
Re-bonding my despondent blonde insomnia
To spin equivocal erratic epic,
Belated maze of many-edgèd legends
And many-ended memories.
I might uncurl my swirling unshored odyssey
Embayed in memory’s meridians,
Distending networked blends of vibrant lifelines…
I’d de-reflect the echoes of my vanished stanzas
Writ in silvered sun-script on a river’s restive eddies,
On plasmaed azure axioms from seething seas
On hoary forests’ whispered mists
On crystal cities’ distal walls and walks...
Perhaps I might un-scar the darkling particles
That hover fuzzily on credos of unheeded dreams
And drift their wisps into divining wines
To sully all with galling sullen colors.
Perhaps I might un-cipher cryptic scriptures
In fields and forests or in labyrinthine villages
Skimmed from dimming windows of re-tracking aircraft
Perhaps I might beneath unworded surfaces
Unfurl redeeming meanings or uplifting missives
Resculpting sunken sufferings as joy-toyed buoyancies…
And yet mayhap such furtive earth-burled searches
Under sundry surfaces unburden dearths
That merely mirror weirder wavy images,
Or bloat demoted hopes or caustic losses
Or transitory cancelled chances...
I might exhume a doom of smeltered cellars
Whose acrid casks untapped from smarting harvest
Etch the seams of years with searing scars.
The landscape-tableaus of my unplumbed countries
Might dub with muddling puzzles or unbroken codes
Untaming my emplanèd never resting-quest.
——————
This lone intoned recital of unchanging rain-song
Revivifies the rivulets of deep depreciated seasons
Immured in currents murmuring of oceans ...
On such a plaintive greying rain-stained day
Uncertain birth immersed me in the world
That new-distillèd children flail with wordless wails
Emergent couriers of later plaint.
My child-world was whirled in legendarities
Enchanted fantasies and tattered tales of sages
Rebordered in the lordly rolls of early earth.
I multituded broods with agile magic
With fancied gentries reveling in untroubled love
With pageants of impervious and ivory victories
Arraigned by fabled races over evil’s creatures.
I mazed the blazing brands of brazen knights
Who over-toppled ghastly gnashing towers
And courted welcomes swelled by welling trumpets,
The thanks of kings untinged from hellish spells…
——————
My mind resigned divined a doubled study
Intoned on tomes of fustian history
The dawning chronicles of length-indentured centuries
Swayed by waning crowns of mired tyrants…
I tredded the unbedded tablets of Egyptian mysteries
Exhumed from fruitless tombs of stony dynasty;
I distaled lists of gore-born laurels
From world-diseasing seizure Roman rule:
Those poisonous despoils for a lonely throne
Imposing over-throated dotaged yoke atop the ancient age
Yet flayed at bay with straining slaves and guilded guilt.
Despite unfettered dressages of early journals
Their stranded languages still molded hope
For mankind realigning dire crimes —
The starkly marching rows of Roman legions,
Unmired midst the latitudes of Latin language
Whose sentiments were rent in tempelled thought,
And verses urned in turns of firmèd bronze,
In iambics or pentameters of attic vintage….
And in monastic scripts of medieval scribes
I heeded deeds of sinless princes and untainted saints
Who strongly strove or meekly preached against an iron time
And spent unfettered deaths for high celestial respite —
Endearing miracles emblazoned in cathedrals
Soaring lofty frozen light and marble shadow,
Still sketching on our skyscapes their uplifting riddles.
I limned intrinsic principles that lash those happenings
Decide the gliding glorias of empire or republic
Allaying greyest nadir or supremest zenith;
I clerked some mark to hark purveying greatness
To deem resplendant regents from the fleeting…
But this instead there treaded tragic axiom
Which stitches history a cataclysmic pattern:
That force-torn wars insanely maimed the meek,
That high-born castes ensavaged sanguine footfalls on the low…
We today in our apathetic anesthetizing times
Decorate belatedly the fated graves
Of rarely chartered martyrs who disproved this brutal rule.
For we, not fazed by fabled fey invaders,
Are terror-flared by silent sightless systems
Splaying fear-inbreeding evils on statistic scales
Dismembering pretended enemies upon haphazard maps
And disinforming drastic battlefields and torture cages.
We forage holy glory with expedient credos
And save our doleful souls in offshore vaults.
——————
Yet I demurred in terse unswerving certitude
That god-placed graces must reface injustices
Redeem believers in undying triumph —
I could not realize the realest zeal of heroes
Nor guess their destinies that wend with winds:
Implode at crossroads into uninflected steps;
Implore the unformed stories of receding realms;
Encapsulate to fractious masses in unmasted bastions
Revisions of recidivist realities...
To earn with roiling toils world-encircling journeys
Until unfabled death in cobbled gutter
Nested in the leaf-loft eaves of last nomadic legend in a leveled age.
——————
MY biding drive in life imprinted mint beginnings
To gear the multi-tiered machinery of meaning;
Still I have grasped but hasps of facts I mapped,
Witting flinted wisdom with erosion’s slowness.
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