JANUARY POETRY

Lady Ruin

by

Ian Stewart Black

I

In echoes through the caverns of my mind

Resounds the triumph of a sainted choir:

Angelic entities my heart designed

To sing the virtues of true love’s desire;

They sing in service to no fabled god

And nor embellish that which nature made:

But stand before my lover’s beauty awed

In cloths of heaven of their whitest shade;

Sweet music does her elegance proclaim,

Though seraphs’ choir won’t see her justice done:

There’s sacrilege within her very name,

An utterance which renders god undone;

In reverence beheld a sainted choir

The idol whom the very stars admire.

II

The very stars who yield salvation’s light

To wayward souls allowed their light to me:

For I was wand’ring through the blackest night,

Beset by callous winds and crashing sea;

Forsaken by the waters that upheld

My vessel to the malice of the gale,

I turned my gaze toward the sky, beheld

The star whose distant hope endowed my sail;

The days were desolation on the waves,

My heart was blind without salvation’s light:

The sea who summoned many to their graves

Would call to me, “surrender to the night”;

The fury of a thousand waves would prove

Inept upon a heart to valour moved.

III

We moved as one, and mortal thirst conspired

Amid our flesh, our bones, our very breath:

Two sep’rate souls engaged, their all afire,

And one emerged from in that little death;

Entire humanity by lust absolved,

My dreams embodied in her velvet skin:

Our passion saw all sense of self dissolved,

I found the font of love and delved within;

Her body writhed in rapturous excess,

Anointed by a flick’ring candle’s light:

We sought a realm of pleasure to possess,

And in that mortal thirst, we took delight;

My heart relinquished and my love astride,

We moved until our wants were satisfied.

IV

Our satisfaction all too swiftly fell

As feeble prey to some ungodly blight:

Angelic choirs dispersed, their song dispelled,

Miasma veiled the guiding stars from sight;

The soul of twain entwined to twain returned,

Its lesser part was mine to carry on:

Infection tore into my heart and burned

My fetid blood, all strength within me gone;

The poison of despair would work its ill

Amid my flesh, my bones, my very breath:

A fallen man without so much as will

To carry what is left of me to death;

Is this the sum of one true love’s remains:

The blackness sweeping through a vessel‘s veins?

V

A vessel to the deepest woes am I,

And favoured plaything of the fallen gods:

The devil’s minions’ cackling laughter cries

From every mirror that my face defrauds;

The gates of hell have opened in my heart

And every virtue has been cast within:

Her loss has worked on me a wicked art,

To make of me a sorrow bound in skin.

Satanic shadows come to taste my grief,

But even as they revel in my strife,

Amid the endless night, there’s one relief:

In time, decay will come to claim my life;

Despair is all that love has left to find

In echoes through the caverns of my mind.