Requiem
Clay F. Johnson
And the poet says that by starlight
You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked
— Rimbaud
Moon-eyed I sight-read the sky
Divining the stars like bones,
Tracing patterns of star-clouds
I prophesize tree-spirits rise,
Slow-burning, curling wisps of smoke
That float like faceless ghosts
Ascending into darkness
Toward undiscovered universes
Breathing death into Earth’s
Planetary lungs, the fire-clouds
Consume the owl-light & witch-stones,
Untuning the music of the stars
In fluctuating starlight,
Undoing nightingale night-craft
Whose melodies of silver lucidity
Occults the moonlight
Waking from a winter’s torpor
And dreams of magic-root raskovnik—
Called furzepig-grass, or moon-clover,
Unlocking buried secrets divine—
My garden hedgehog would rise
To hear her nightingale sight-read the sky,
Listening enraptured to the night-bird
Singing to the stars of another world
With blueberries & raspberry jam
I fattened my famished hedgie,
And her sleepy, gnomic life
No longer seemed a mystery,
Yet each night she awoke,
Crept out from the shadow
And with upward-gazing eyes
Counted stars & absorbed the night
Until like a rare night-ower
Picked beneath singing starlight,
I plucked my fattened hedgie
From a golem grasscutter’s blades—
Night’s birdsong became requiems,
My hedgehog garden a grave
When I held her mangled death
I lost touch with reality,
For the moon & stars were captured
In the black of her cold, dead eyes,
And when I placed her into the earth
I buried the starry night sky