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Recitation

Seven shelves of burnt volumes

Poets of ashen pages,

Ember words of the burning sages

A thousand histories, a thousand dooms

Overgrown and empty rooms

A father’s love and studied virtue

A daughter’s neglected secret world

Tender words can find no perch here

Dust will settle over each endearment

And the stones will endure

I am the Death Owl in the Tower of Flints

"This... is my hour

The hour of my reincarnation

This is my glory –

you must go away"

The white silence was terrible

White with the bodies of the circling owls

The Tower, the pines, the corpse, the moon

At the time eaten opening at the base of

The Tower of Flints

Recitation