Issue 10
Spring 2002
Christopher Rizzo
THE HUGUENOTS
‘August 25, 1572’
He wallows. Prays. Disturbs the night’s silence
With his silence; the pitch is salient.
He disbelieves the blood, the room questioned
In which he lies, a hard-wood killing floor.
Surely, a sign: the torch-lit dead en masse
Prostrated to the hilt. The pity-hues,
The killable denials, he hears, those dragged
To death between Le Havre and Honfleur.
Is wroth, this face of living-martyrdom,
Is dark the selvage he stares to; to God
Were we forgone, let live to remember?He looks certain. I lie and turn to the wall,
Have ears to hear but am too deafened: who
Am I to tell if I am damned. Or anyone.
THE LONG RESPITE
As snow darkens these doors of saltbox homes
And settles blessedly, we stay, unheard,
And harden through the years of purgation.
The lace-mill’s husk still holds its world-war looms;
The empty wharf cries creak, tilts with the tide;
As history’s exiles, we are broken.
That sailing Christ that meets the coming storms
That sags mid-air upon the spar, is dead;
Is more than nothing, less than our token.
We see the grace of God: the paned frost gleams:
The past is freezing-out upon the strand.
Inside, we hunch under the down of mammoth dreams.
‘A BATTLE HYMN’
We hold our affectation in regard
And march on light: these flagstaffs buoy beams
Of Romankind, and marked upon our scrolls
Are throes, asperities, chrisms of blood
That dye the rainbow of astonishment.
We see: from wound to wound the human veins
Anoint the earth: for this our kingdom stood silenced.
And still you heat the harrowed flue of Hell.
Peerless we watch, and watch, and sing
And sniff the aether for diminishing
Returns—the point upon which we thus knell:
Your glories grasp, like supple-jacks to stone,
The selves you kill and mourn and kill and mourn…
Say that your eyes have seen. They will again.