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Their Men and Their Chalices
Men came walking who had clear chalices
made of fragments, all of crystals, with concise and crafted edges.
They had no juice nor held no wine and
bore no water of a kind;
just reflected all the waning torchlight.
They were foreign with large noses
and beards grown of accordance with feral laws of nature.
They didn't hold axes nor hatchets nor lance,
but the air about them smelled of the ether.
Most of them balding, and lost at the teeth;
most of them baring scars and the razes of a very dis-heartened, world-weary way.
With them they carried the sound of sticks swimming
beneath modest turbulence of mid-summer swell.
The voices they'd bellow seemed lost and unsure,
but their volume and strangeness would grab for our ears.
Their stares were wide and fevered; ghastly and far...
As if caught up in some great horror that only they could comprehend
that was oh so distant, but drawing quickly near,
set upon the thought of us between its snarling jowls.
We lay upon stillness and cool, handled quiet
as though as not to frighten - as though as not to harm.
In the end they chose to scurry down the corridors
that lead to marred and mangled landscape with no discernible horizon.
The resolution to absence that seemed distilled in them
was likely the only force suited to force them through such hardships.
We feared for their fates, but chose to build walls...
Lest they carry small and stealthy ne'er-do-wells from the outer reaches.
They haven't returned and we suspect they've found their end
at the hands of something well beyond the bounds of reason.
We'll await a distant glint, of light upon a chalice,
perhaps filled with the rain water of a distant province.
