The Collector

The Collector

I am a collector of

the poetry of death
of its fusillade barrages

of its subtle lingual dagger

of its dancing damascus blades

patterned like lost sonnets, even

the fat cannister whose prostrate poison

creeps silent over the lambstongue,

rhyming the skeletal with the skin.

               

Sharp by sharp

through the flint-flash labyrinth

where the iron blossoms of

synchronized sidearms pound

the percussion of the butcher's ballet,

the bomb's verse writes me a language

of ancient echo, splintery stabs

of the flung broken, the cellular scream itself

that is the breaker of worlds.

In the center where the bodies fold

every sword’s a stanza, every

barrel a ballad, each soldier a

poem crafted to parse autumn light
on shafts of wheat, to appear and fade

before the sickle’s edge,

springborn fodder for the beasts,

relentlessly gathered 
into red sheaves.

May 2012



Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Process note: "Damascus steel was a term used by several Western cultures from the Medieval period onward to describe a type of steel used in swordmaking from about 300 BCE to 1700 CE. These swords are characterized by distinctive patterns of banding and mottling reminiscent of flowing water..." ~wikipedia

I have used the idiosyncratic term lambstongue to refer to lambsquarters, or pigweed, an edible weed in the goosefoot family. 
The second stanza references Oppenheimer's quote  from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." when the first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945 in New Mexico.

Image: Antiquarian, by Petteri Sulonen, on flick'r

Used with his kind permission. Thank you, Petteri, for the picture which inspired this poem.

Petteri's photostream

Petteri blogs on all things political, social, Buddhist, photographic and horological, as well as anything else that catches his interest at his eclectic and always instructive site, Come to Think of It.