Where are the citizens, the bronze miners?
Whitewashed houses murmur their retributions –
nothing has changed,
their spirits are still here;
defined and bent with prohibitions –
unearthed among the back roots
that touch my heart endlessly,
burning like an ochre flame.

In my closet lies a dark ledger –
prosaic and bottomless;
its brooding tricephalous
frowns on my trinity,
fatherly and skeletal – a sure promise,
tense cohabitation, flayed and cornerless,
foreign in breed and cult.
Praying for its cessation
I offer up memories –
stamped quite suddenly into my raw hide.

Beside the houses are gnarled roots
spluttering their acephalous cries,
dark accusations are their milk;
their tears fall to earth, an anvil sky
belches forth its poisons. In the ground,
black saplings
emerge struggling in ashen soils.
Shall I refuse this sanctuary,
its dark waters?
Looming ancestral skies resign my blood.