Embers

Those embers,
pinpricks unto Aldebaran,
follow them not,
for theirs is the moth way,
the aimed and aimless,
ticked onto glass
before the light goes out.

How brazen, the ancients,
to carve the sky into beasts
and urns from which pours nothing
but the likenesses of pride
and unknowing.

Crouch by the fire, brave ones,
for in these tongues
some knowledge is formed,
some crack in the vowels,
that sting like char in the ear,
and once fed, consumes.

And blameless the extinguished,
the fluttered ash cast up
and spent into darkness,
as they know not their death,
the lilt of their falling —
Lift not your eyes.

But let shadow presume
upon your face the flickering
end, the flash dividing night from day,
breath from breath, and know,
that each surged fury, each long
yellow hand groping for starlight
is a denouncement, a refutation, a wish,
a denial of timber and all who gather,
all that kneel there, feeding and sung:

for all who rise are then thus burned,
and spurned upon the heavens hung.

Image: Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash