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ANGELS
We were a multitude, until the hunters,
scouting the immemorial pastures
with hewn weapons, on foot and horseback,
tracked us down where we ambled grazing
and fell upon us with poisoned javelins,
picking us off, first one by one,
then scourging by hundreds as they closed in,
burning, smoking us from the homelands,
hounds baying, snapping our heels,
till, blood-glutted, gorged on our meat,
wearing our hides, copying our calls
and rubbing our fat, death-scented,
into their flesh to charm and ensnare us,
in droves ambushed, for blood smell only,
as if to wipe out a hunger for hunger
by slaughtering, to become us, to be us,
their glazed eyes deep, ice-covered pools
where our charred valleys were drained moistureless
and our own murders measured and mirrored,
and we scattered to barren tundra.
And there evolved. In full light and day ebb
and utter darkness, warily through every
season, kept watch, and by winds smelled them,
learned their shadow shapes and cunning
and when to rush through the closed circles
of their web-knit formations that hemmed us in
amid moving henges of hurlers and missiles
and, leaner, hardened, lighter-footed,
wove secret speech of our own.
But on they harried us, overtaking
infants and aged as they fell back,
hacked off limbs, and what was left
of crippled mutilated bodies
hanged for trophies on bark-stripped poles,
while we who still had strength enough
fled through the few remaining trees,
stumbled aimless over moors and heathland
into deserts to die of thirst, hid
in caves and were lost in their windings
under bleak hills, or perished in forests
beyond borders of the known world rim.
We who survived, ten, twelve, sixteen,
now wild in willpower and aware of destiny,
waking more sternly with each weary step,
came out of despair and to land edge
and plunged for refuge in deep waters
under the ice floes. And six or seven died
frozen or drowned, and there were no more
young. Lungs afire for want of air,
the rest swallowed, held on, swam deeper,
limbs attuning to water’s rhythms,
building fat under newly sealed pores,
muscles till now unused growing firmer,
breath longer, blood beat slower,
the whole skin another ear drum,
eyes widening to take in darkness.
Self-delighting in a borrowed world,
slow to learn grace, we received as a rite
water’s gift, laughter, that drowns weeping
and engulfs memory of all time but presence
which, itself a flood, buoyed us up
to sing across aeons, and our long calls
spanned oceans’ depths and embraced the other
depths we embraced in and through one another,
till our speech took on the pitch and resonance
memory’s currents had eroded in us
wound round the endless whorls of the sea.
And so multiplied, grew sleek and lazy,
vast in girth, living only for music,
when their sensors picked up our frequencies.
Then slaughter was unstinted and our cries,
churning placid waters, hammering the soft
inverted womb the seas had become, whose walls
we beat on, numbing last strengths uselessly,
jammed their tracking instruments as too late
remembering a nightmare from another
world, or other existence, again we woke
and dragged their bucking vessels leashed behind us
across the waves’ vertiginous surface. Then blood
stained estuaries and caked whole coastlines
where our hauled wrecks were carved and heaped
in messes on the beaches, till the creeks stank.
Then we were few: three, perhaps, four.
To zones unhaunted, by no fish followed,
where water’s weight and sheer blackness
pressed till we shrank and merged with shadows,
down we dived, deeper than terror.
Then we were two. and we sang each other
of Tiphareth, of the Throne, of the Glory.
Indescribable our lamentations,
we, the uncounted, the unaccountables,
sons and daughters of the starry heavens
become a lost calling without a name
drifting among unfathomed valleys,
until I called, recalled, and heard
no answering song. Then quietly I climbed
and on a still sea trumpeted, took air
and dived for ever. And you’ll not find me
nor you nor you, till the almond tree flowers
on the mountain, and there is no more sea.
