Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Five November-December 2024
Three Seraphim, poems by John W Sexton.
The First Seraph
That angel drove a chain into the moon,
and swung it as a thurible. Moonlight
thus entered into daylight: time was stilled.
Sleeping and wakefulness collided, and all
was dream. And in that dream we held alert,
all minds on earth in focus. The last apricot
hung from the tree of souls, but its golden flesh
was puckered. Azure finches came upon it,
and their troubling broke it free. Into an ageless
darkness it fell, but a descent of no ending.
In this endless fall the finches pecked it clean.
Its stone hung inviolate, geology of stretchmarks:
a metaphor of past births and births to come.
All on earth stood aghast at this thing done, undone.
The Second Seraph
That angel was the daughter of Betrayal,
thus named Betrayed. She pared her fingernails
on the grinding-wheel of the sun. The pearl-lustre
dust of her claws descended upon us. We choked
in our breathing, and each hacking cough
was the name of a child ignored, the countless
dead in the many nations of our indifference.
Upon the rings of Saturn she shaved her hair,
and her blades of grey came down upon us.
No one was spared from this impalement.
Her hair was the desolation of Palestine,
the detritus of her nails the dust of Lebanon.
But our pleas were for none but our own kin,
and our pity only for the tearing of our skin.
The Third Seraph
That angel was a fire of molten gold,
the wealth of which evaporated all flesh;
the fat of which rose upwards to heaven,
from the condensed sum of which
our emission of song. “Oh rendered suet
of human folly, praise the powers
that grant us second voice. In death
we sing to the throne of creation,
that catalyses the unworthy thus to glory.”
And then that angel breathed a freezing,
and our rendered flesh became pure soul,
and all descended slowly, a scattered snowfall.
Then the world at last shone white and silver,
and the earth was held in that eternal slumber.
© John W Sexton
John W. Sexton’s poetry is widely published and he has been a regular contributor to Live Encounters. A collection of experimentalist poetry, The Nothingness Kit, is now out from Beir Bua. In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.