We feared that this might be
our longest sleepless night. We feared to see
the Lightning-Bearer and the Crow —
to feel flames feed on our old failing, oaken strength —
to hear the haunting laugh at our unsilent
blight of madness in a Mammon-blasted land.
Why not just call them Kings, come from afar,
these Two? The Old, the New.
The Two have reconciled themselves to meeting
after centuries of wheeling down
the lines of distant spheres — have reconciled themselves
to putting past the memory, the blame,
if but for one brief Earthly day:
For one was Lord, once, and, asleep, castrated
by the second one, his own goat-suckled Son.
Old Jupiter and Saturn.
Older Zeus and Cronus.
Fire-blistered stands the oak, and severed
falls the mistletoe. The oldest Crow
of all of last year calls
to be reborn the Crow of all of next.
Conjunction, as they call it.
Just to human eyes, we know. Alignment,
glimpsed at gloaming from a waning world defiled
by her own troubled child.
How small, our traveled spheres! And yet they touch
the one upon the other. And they stretch
as far as sight may reach —
not that our eyes see light afar, this night.
The clouds, here, close off every King and sphere and star
despite our knowing just how long they planned
on meeting right there where they are.
We feared that this might be
a night immersed in deeper woe than what is here,
this windy, starless solstice night.
We must not rest, and yet it is that all the same
we know that we must sleep to dream ourselves
from where we were to what must be —
from here to farther where conjoining spheres
hold our enclosing but expanding ways,
our circle-tracing and yet interweaving days.
The oldest Crow of all: we never see
but only hear her. Over years
she calls, to this small night of ours —
then leaves us to our joys, and to our fears.
