The ancient faces look out towards eternity
through the heat that engulfs the city
but the trial is only a trial if you perceive it so -
since the fire is only the image of death.
And if it is death that worries you, throw out
the debris that you have accumulated
before it is too late, before the fire snaps
at your feet and engulfs your chalky bones.
Then you will have come full circle
in your endeavours to reach the darkness
which envelops but never obscures the soul.
If only all your dreams had been so clear -
Oh thoughts! brief and unlooked for,
opaque as stars on winter nights,
the path is barred before us, the stone edifice
of the ancestors is falling to earth,
along the ruined stage we wander,
through the suburbs in ruins we count the toll
of charred bodies, everywhere cinders,
smoke, devastation but most of all
it is ash that chokes the throat,
mounds of ash that deluge the streets
making it impossible to drag the feet
from one sorry corner to the next.
Down there, now, a child cries in the dust
for his mother, the unblemished eye
stares out from the sarcophagus
and does not stir, though day is night
and night is day, the blackened heads
gape towards time without end.
The belladonna lily sheds its white petals
into the unending heat, the sad and tired truth
glows in the embers of divine relics,
the embers of remembering glow
at the back of the brain, how plain
it all was before today, how simple
words like 'justice' rolled off
the swollen tongue, here in the labyrinth
there can be no trial without smoke
and no smoke without fire.