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some lesser spotted verse

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This poem was inspired by the painting below. 
The poem and painting were 
published in The Thinker Vol 43 2012.
Picture
© Bridget Pitt - no reproduction without permission
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


    Please contact me if you would like to reproduce this poem or image in electronic or print form

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