This poem was inspired by the painting below. 
© Bridget Pitt - no reproduction without permission
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The guardians
We who walk On worn out soles through mouldered leaves Shuffling over down-trod earth who tug and sing the threaded veins That feed the arcane springs of birth We who weave the frog spawn membranes stretched between The fingers of your dying breath The parchment skin through which the sun Falls on shrouded blindfold death We who cross, and cross again The burnt out grasslands of your dreams with feathered wing, or velvet snout Fragments of some greater wheel We who turn and turn about We whose whispers drown your shouts We who ride the wailing winds The ice-locked flints on boreal squall Who bruise beneath your buttressed bones And falter with their buckling fall We who land on barren soil and fan its flames with hollow sighs who drift like ash through toxic clouds to settle on your shop-soiled lies With scabrous claws or cloven hoof We scratch out words in shifting sands The anthems of each fractured soul Trickle through our wizened hands We who lie beneath your heel Crushed beneath your circling dance With splintered limbs we shield you yet From the parched and burning lands We sink below your drowning light yet brace our spines against its tides And nurse your stunted mutant life © Bridget Pitt |