#cinalilli

(cinalilli)

The empty hearths breed ashes, fleeting snow;

No whiter bone could scatter on the drafts,

No seedless field could beckon famished crow;

They fly away to seek out warmer crafts.

And younger hands will never clasp as warm,

With breath so distant, cold, and wan’dring far;

For Fate’s red threads, pulled tight, destroying form,

Flinch under Time’s sharp freezing, winter char.

But hearths relight and save their fragrant charms,

Young hands, new hands, clasp tightly in the spring,

Two breaths that walk away from winter’s harms:

The crowning jewels that robe the vernal king.

For Fate’s long vessels pulled by Time’s small prick

Roaring quiet waters through a field-like cavern,

Purely glowing, cyan-black, before the soft falls,

Home for me is not the river-side star-petaled blooms.

Quietly they sway, their song-rustling echoing

Like the Underground’s song faded to a whisper

By losing the end of the world’s most lonely dream.

Little noise sounds here aside from the waterfalls.

Once, a music box consoled the star-hungry blooms,

Will I one day hear his anthem’s hopeful echo?

Our nation knows that funeral grieving whisper,

Though but one soul has been lost to this stifled dream,

It was not the first to wander in the cavern.

They come here, to cry unto the open star-blooms

A song of many years, by now but an echo:

“Wish upon a star,” I hear them often whisper,

“Stars have always listened to even the least dreams.

But though there are no stars in the skies of caverns,

Prayers are always heard by the buds under the falls.”

The flowers betray their supplicants through echoes,

Unregarded hopes spread uselessly around in our own voices,

Powerless stars, adding nothing to ev’ry dream.

Every soul for all their worth is left a cavern.

To serve each the duty out of starry hands falls.

The world’s liberation rests not upon just blooms.

Eight times now life has abandoned a soul’s voice,

A grim reminder of our collective dwindling dream.

Ignoring our only distractions in the cavern,

We will wait until the last petal downward falls,

One day our determination together will bloom

And leave our days Underground as a faint echo.

To see the shining sun again is our last dream

To shatter the barrier before our darkened cavern

And reclaim at last enlightenment beyond the waterfalls

Beyond the leaking secrets of resounding blooms.

We remember our prince’s remaining echoes,

Perhaps in vain we recall the foretold voice:

“For through their wings we are liberated, each bloom

Will when the angels descend into silence fall,

A champion who bloodied North and South

Whose words, constrained to word of faithful mouth,

King Charlemagne, the lord of God’s own Franks

United peaks and mountains, shores and banks.

His empire won, the West his new regime--

Defending from invasions strange each seam:

If Europe was to be his mink-lined train,

Without routine adjustments, it’d prove his bane.

Alas, on Christmas Day the tow’ring king,

Hands clasped, head cowed, a child’s meek hymn to sing.

The Wartime set aside--goodwill now men’s.

Today peals loud like cack’ling headless hens.

A useless crown, confounded by its peers

Did land--somehow--between his curl-topped ears,

Dropped by the Pope like red-hot dropp’d mixtape,

From mouths of bards that laud the crown on nape;

That Christmas day, though near no heath-fire

The land was great, but no empire.

Of Rome the crown did claim its homeland shore

But miles from its home, it mattered no more;

And holy it was not, despite the Church

That placed a kingdom like a goose on perch.

But Charlemagne, outraged, could do but naught: