The Glass Sepulchre

 

Mario Mesaglio

I stumbled across it high on a hillside

shrouded in ivy and forget-me-not

the day before my journey home.

 

The place was marked by an old walnut tree

visible from the bottom of the slope,

a sentinel under a malicious sky.

 

Obeying a dark inner urge, I started to 

scramble up on all fours to the beat of

shuddering trees performing a leafy

 

war dance. 

The climb was arduous,

slow; my legs like blasted bone,

my ears numbed by the storm surge.

                                                                                    

I crawled faster, faster, groping.

Grit painted my nails dung-black,

my knees, palms gravel-red;

 

my eyes closed against rose thorns

piercing the skin of my cheeks,

until I found the green of silvered

 

grass spread before an ice-cold arch

at the entrance. Elbowing the ground,

toes bent, pushing hard against the stone

 

of a foot-worn step, I dragged my body

behind me into the diamond shelter,

a firstling like Alice, I climbed inside;

 

too small, too small to stop the walls

from crushing, splintering, fragmenting

into a honey-combed, pock-marked

 

battlement. Dread had lulled my senses

into quiet in the raging storm as though

that place was beyond death:

 

exquisite, essential, a wasteland.

                                                                                                          

There, on a ledge a petrified rose

beside scratched, scraped bones

with symbols I did not recognise.

 

I rested under the vaulted ceiling

waiting for the storm to pass;

I thought how rain is formed:

 

the evaporation of rivers, streams,

seas by sun into cloud to return

as pieces of rainbow and scraps

 

of words: 'Hidden in the wound

is the wounded self''; I thought of my

self-delusion: sending you off to fight

 

another's cause. Come home, come home

before you become a human statue, a stone

death's head, crooked like Michelangelo’s

 

Pieta in Rome, when all was possible; nothing denied. 

 

Suddenly, the storm collapsed

hitting the ground running,

strafing hailstones across the floor

 

of the tomb. Nature was in retreat:

the forest drew back, volcanoes implode,

angels run for cover, garner

 

the blasted womb.

 

Words of rage by their very

nature make an end of mind's life in death,

and there is no end to it all.

 

No end to it all.

 

My mother was a dedicated gardener;

she tended flower beds, vegetable patches,

made her wounded journey home.

 

Jean Rees-Lyons