Depleted Mine

Depleted Mine

Depleted Mine

Living these lives, we let this wind
Do what it knows best,
This dry African breeze
Blowing through our souls,
Fanning the dying flames within.
We mourn what we desire
But never will possess . . .

We sit inside this earthen cavity
Of an ageing mine.
The prospectors have
Said goodbye, & gone.
We know nothing
But how to conjure flecks
Of gold in the thick air,
Building upon swampy odour
Illusions of a future,
Forgeries of the past . . .

Murmuring to ourselves,
We form on this mine’s dust,
With our chapped fingers,
Stars like those adorning
Our eternally sunless sky
Dazzling as the distant
Glorious kingdoms, whose songs
We hear enviously, at night,
From a gaping distance,
haunting . . .

The sun rises on the pure
& bloodstained alike.
How pure is funeral song?
How red is Caesar’s throne?
Let it be it crimson
in the reign of the deranged . . .
These rotting pillars of the continent.