Crest and Trough

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Crest and Trough

Poem

All mine proclamations sum now to a venerating silence,
My heart oath-bound to Thy inconceivable charter.
Vain seems thought, pointless even knowing prescience,
For savourless seems all this world’s profane barter.

Speak then for Thy absence, here by cold winter seas
I vigil upon the horizon line for a smudge to appear,
But all is an even sun-denying grey spilt in skies,
And the waves that moan to a forlorn empty air.

Another fruitless dusk arrives with hued tears,
A dull tint cast without care like a just widowed.
Another wasted whirl of this earth on its axis,
The sole perennial ritual for Thee enacted.

The coin of my days and nights are all now spent.
My vigil is ceaseless like the unsleeping star
Lidless eyes scouting the far wide spaces’ extent,
For Thy coming mounted on a chariot of meteor.

What affinity Thine with such silence, what attraction,
The reins Thou once held, counselling on battle-car,
Shaking the worlds with Thy proclamation and vision,
I pine for Thy chastising counsel and the bloody war.

Thou knowest I tire not of bodies, nor the burden of woe,
Each scar I bore for Thee my cherished reward enough.
I fear not felling nor fall, nor the scoffing of foe,
Only be by my side in each my crest and trough.