The voracious tongues of winter
Lash a bay bereft of smiles
And the courageous city lights
Have been stripped of all their wiles
The beleaguered streets obscured
By the leering growth of dark
Its all too eager appetite
Menacing like sharks
With deception as the mother
Of the children of the earth
And perception of the masses
Savaged of all worth
The ensuing disarray
Had ravaged generations
Left pursuing an illusion
With haunting desperation
And all those veiled hearts
Stood facing the wrong way
And failed to discern
All that the winds were trying to say
Yet purity remained
Like an insult in the midst
In obscurity it hovered
A tiny lamp deep in the mist
Astride a thousand questions
At the edge of the bay
Upon the final tide of innocence
Sat Esmerelda May
A confused and tumbling ocean
Made its way up to her feet
Fumbling through the sand
Of which she’d made her seat
It was no small thing to find
Though dark and surging to and fro
Those falling waves when crashing down
Burst awash with a white glow
That night three bottomless wells
Purged the depths of their fears
The oceans might, the teeming rain
And an endless stream of tears
It’s a curious thing to find
When you turn your back on time
And all its furious gyrations
Cease their rhythm and their rhyme
When the one remaining measure
Is the pounding in your chest
Pertaining to the treasure
You’d forgotten you possessed
And she’d never felt so lost
As she hurled her questions at the sky
Each one swallowed by forever
Then marching off to die
Yet upon the winds darkest harmonies
Your voice will carry further
And Esmerelda’s starkest moments
Took flight with boundless fervor
And so time lost its footing
As she took to her feet
A line crossed, no turning back
Where heart and reality meet
Her reachings pierced the fabric
Of the framework of eternity
Thus breaching the elastic dark
That holds us in uncertainty
Though fleeting was her glimpse
Into the colours of the Inbetween
Her meeting with the shade of truth
Revealed an ocean unforseen
Oblivious to ignorance
Its relentless current swelling
Pitiless, pervading all
An endless stream so telling
Yet the plumage of her fading race
Had overwhelmed its hue
Now wading through the undertones
Though once resplendent and imbued
She slipped unnoticed through the city
Iridescent in the grey
Like remotest, distant memories
Set free when the tether frayed
When the pure are forsaken
And wish for their release
Who are the mistaken -
Those who remain or those deceased?
And so the gravest of convictions
Began to whisper in her heart
Esmerelda away
Away; you must depart
She weaved her way passed laughing ghosts
Who knew nought of shadow teeth
Who grieved not for the loss
Or for the maddening current underneath
Through narrowing streets to city's edge
She hastened toward her goal
Where harrowing art climbed the walls
The remnants of lost souls
Then the concrete left behind her
The city in her wake
And so completely unaware
Of just what was at stake
Though the music of the writhing grass
Tried to warn her so
And the sheets of driving rain
Whispered all she needed to know
Through the manic fields rainbows swam
Sweeping madly here and there
Like panicked beauty cornered
Seeking freedom from despair
A single teardrop left the eye
Of Esmerelda May
And mingled with the glistening field
Which suddenly then turned grey
For the last time she began to cry
And collapsed into the grass
She cast her eye across dark skies
Then slowly, gently passed
Nameless, shapeless figures
Blackened the coming dawn
With a morose and gaping sameness
Atop the spires they adorned
Then all at once without a sound
Swept down into the city
And drowned all with deathly darkness
Without preference, without pity
Yet it had not been without cause
That Esmerelda’s field had greyed
It was merely pregnant pause
Whilst a path for truth was made
There had been rainbows in her tears
For her tears were borne of truth
Like the graceful falling leaves
Of golden Autumns youth
(Do you know the reason why
Rainbows visit us in halves?
It’s because they’re anchored so,
And from pure realms flow their paths)
And as her essence joined the Inbetween
There was made a space on earth
In a sense a channel
Through which a second storm was birthed
From above the raging seas
It swelled with fresh conviction
And weaving beneath that dark reprise
The shapes of sinister affliction
The dawn was proven impotent
And humanity on its knees
But the new storm swirling above the world
Would shift the fate of these
It gathered up its seething mass
Roaring with contempt
Breathing songs of thunder
With the fiercest of intent
Then a single shaft of softest light
Streamed in defiance through the sky
As if the very heavens laughed
And opened a single, churning eye
A thousand luminous rainbows
Appeared blazing in the breach
Numinous they hung
Arrayed far beyond eyes reach
Then dissolving, hissing, screaming
Unearthly anguish from below
As the pure, streaming rain
Took like acid to the shadows
Contorting beneath the onslaught
Oh how those dark shapes fled
Aborting in an instant
Their long laid plan of dread
Then for the first time in so long
Silence behind the rain
A stillness in the rhyme
And a delicate refrain
Though still wept that cleansing storm
Upon the slowly calming bay
Still fell the cleansing tears
Of Esmerelda May