The Gilded Trench

Poetry

My armor is a skin of oxidized gold, sinking where the river-silt takes hold. I remember the songs of the courtly dance, the velvet whispers of a summer in France; now I hear only the matchlock's sudden cry, ripping the grey of a low, heavy sky. The village of Amiens is a skeleton of stone, where the wind whistles through a marrowless bone. We stand in the mire, our boots filled with clay, counting the hours of a colorless day. The crests of the houses are broken and bare, and the scent of black powder hangs thick in the air. I carry your letter, pressed flat in my glove, the fragile, ink-stained scripture of love. You speak of the gardens, the scent of the lime, while we measure our lives by a stalemate of time. Three hundred winters of a fence made of lead, where the living are ghosts and the ghosts are well-fed. Yet look at the ledge where the rusted helm lies, where a small, yellow primrose begins to arise. It drinks from the runoff of iron and rain, a bright, quiet pulse in a valley of pain. It does not know wars, or the weight of the crown; it simply blooms while the empire sinks down.