Creation quaked voices –
It was a cortege
Of mourning and lament
Crow could hear and he looked around fearfully.
The swift’s body fled past
Pulsating
With insects
And their anguish, all it had eaten.
The cat’s body writhed
Gagging
A tunnel
Of incoming death-struggles, sorrow on sorrow.
And the dog was a bulging filterbag
Of all the deaths it had gulped for the flesh and the bones.
It could not digest their screeching finales.
Its shapeless cry was a blort of all those voices.
Even man he was a walking
Abattoir
Of innocents –
His brain incinerating their outcry.
Crow thought ‘Alas
Alas ought I
To stop eating
And try to become the light?’
But his eye saw a grub. And his head, trapsprung, stabbed.
And he listened
And he heard
Weeping
Grubs grubs He stabbed he stabbed
Weeping
Weeping
Weeping he walked and stabbed
Thus came the eye’s
roundness
the ear’s
deafness.