Traces

Spiral snake-shaped ammonites with coiled-shelled chambers,

Sutured shell-caves in grey-blue mouldered muddiness,

Each bedded chamber keeps time for a being in life.

The polished marble of medieval cathedrals

is the klastos of coiled shells and fine-grained limestone;

Water snails scribble life on its masoned surface.

In Selskar Abbey the gabled buttresses rise

into pinnacles that catch the dawn’s herring-bone glow,

the sandstone stained red by the sun on desert dunes.

The straying stars are peepholes to infinity,

From where to judge the traces we leave behind us,

Evidence, telling as clay-fired pots in the earth.

We who are spits of clay from the potter’s wheel

hold shaped in our molten minds traces that heroise

doom-driven Homer’s sword-swishing blood-gorged ghost.

Yes: we have our vocabularies weaving art,

like the spume from the white waterwall plume bearing

a rainbow that gleams colours above the darkness.

On the soiled window of a deserted cottage

sits a cup of time’s dust layered with fine dry ash,

a trace from the chimneys of the red-flamed Shoah.