White as illusions, cast to shade scarlet and crimson
and the black of the human heart in better lights,
transcendent nights where the perfectability of a kiss
becomes a sexorcism that banishes demons of clay and brass,
glass spiders in graven images imagined to be more
than they were less of, more than what they were,
and of a substance hammered by the artisans
who knew well their craft as they laughed
at their own cunning, running rings around Saturn
and laying myth to the Achilles Heel
of the lost worshipers of polytheism.
A communion of stones and water,
bones that slaughter even after the flesh fails
and the evangelist sails for a purer night
than offered as sacred sacrifice to fallen idols.
How long can you pray to the failed, the scrailed words
on tablets of earth and bone, the deeper demons remain
and the pain is inhuman, put aside for a time to come.
William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.
(re-parsed because I wanted to)
Thursday, April 23, 2009
White Sunday IIII
Labels: 2009, White Sunday 3 observations
3 observations:
i'm confused. i dictionary.com'd the word scrailed and it does not exist, and when yahoo'd it said "did you mean scrabble?" and oddly your poem came up in our search, several times ... so, did you mean scrabble, as you dabbled and babbled, or shnabel’d ... i know you are scrailing your head right now to try and figure this out ... oops, i meant scratching, rehashing, hatching and mismatching ... did you mean scrabble … because i’m totally enthralled, scrawled, or perhaps scrailed to scale the mountains to find and rewind to read this poem again, once i understand to withstand and scrail, your tale.
do you scrail in braille?
You are right. The current dictionary does not have "scrailed" in it. It is a word I coined, somewhere between "scratched" and "carved" and "gouged" to imply a harsh, deep cutting of a hard surface to mark it that creates a sound unpleasant to the ears.
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