Dinner Plate

Flies defect from droning flight
To poise in menace clouds
Over bodies wheedled where
The promise of a glory share
Turned banner into shroud.

They perch upon pointed steel-
Sleek, silver, slaked-
Silhouetted against the sun, huddled
On smokey dolmens, scarlet-puddled.
And women left for dead, naked.

There are breathless physicians
With blighted hands dispensing care
A horse wheezes, groans, loudly wails.
Foul odours gleam a golden trail
Through the ashen air.

The world is whorling, turning open;
The worms interred are now intruding,
Wriggling in the dusk. The day
Is closing. A rotten array,
A banquet of bone and string.

From misty veil to grimy gut
The valorous borne into the earth,
Swallowed - like Badroulbadour
Concatenating their thankless gore
And making  mockery of birth.

The centipede borne on the flag
And stamped upon the public coin
Has coiled round the lancer's point
And plunged into the beggar's rag,
Annealed the silvered pyramid.

An old politician said:
"Let blood be stone, let ringed hand
Swiftly lay the bricks of the dead,
A new temple for the old godhead.
Let painted spears form a wreath
Of boys in wine-colored costume,
Ennobling all remaining breath.
Let honey gild the rim of death,
Let painters limn the unlimned gloom,
And the gore of men again anoint
The spoils of their father's tombs."

With sterling sword and magic root
The sons of sons and their employ
Go making sons and minting coin.