From website gregglory.com
Written by Gregg Glory (Gregg G. Brown)
Torturous Splendours of the Dream
By Gregg Glory
Published by
BLAST PRESS
Copyright © 1996 Gregg G. Brown
ANAR-KISSED: PINDAR REPEATED
Olympian Ode Number One (To Hiero In Syracuse)
1
Water and gold, water and gold,
coeval equals, preemininant values the two;
a value, a clarity
at brookside as in cash-bin,
a claritas, a clearness there,
clarity at the brookside
equal clearness in the cash-bin, gold burning
as fire outshining midnight,
puts all the other owned things to the torch,
man's wisp of pride going up in the smoke.
But (my soul!) but if---
you want, in charged desire
to celebrate unconquerable contests,
unchanging games charting pure skills
don't stare
to other stars
through lightyears of emptiness
that shut out the sun, look here
in simple Olympia
where my wire of song
is spun in arcing coronal,
spiked glories plaited stark
and chimed in the mind
and hung on the tongue,
and torqued in the heart,
and splined divine
in the deciding eyes
of every chanting poet as they come
hollering God's name,
and changing it, turning
syllables to bells
ringing the radiant house of Heiron, rich
enough to act justly in Sicily,
getting the skim off every title,
given it
from the open hands of the people,
forcing
his light tunic to go heavy
with honors reaped in a tidal wave.
2
Hia! his tittering heart jumps to trumpets,
sighs to the bright sea-chanties of rude, red men
that round the singing table and splitting boards
circle the singing sailors as they sing.
So finger down the Dorian lyre
from its dusty peg, and if
remotest Pisa can fling up
rememberance fit to each miracle, welcome
each one with presto phrases of your acutest twang.
And if that fine arabian, Pherenikos,
clips along Alpheos' magic stream, racing
unspurred inches of his dainty auburn flank
to vault the cantered body of his Lord
deep into the grip of winning,
resign then the wandering passions of your mind
to the emblazoned graces of his sparking hooves.
3
Knight and King of Syracuse, high Heiron,
whose glassy blazonings, praises, mark
burning roses on the rocks
of Pelops as they blaze:
Hear of Pelops, who earth-shattering Posideon
swaled in watery arms.
Tricked from the gemmed wilderness of waves
by Klotho's abstract, unfeigning hand,
born thus out of the faceless traceries
of coronaed corals, they walked
to the windy fireplace on the rocks;
already his wet shoulder was flickering ivory,
as in her nursing eyes he dreamed.
Yet still this fabled lullaby in the crib,
spic miracle on the innocent, infant lips,
a snowy blanket pulled up to downy
noses,
becomes degraded to wry, distorted songs,
and between grown lips gets stretched to lies
when bearded men roll joking in their drunk.
And whispering Grace the beautiful, the pure,
herself her sheeny scarves may lend,
wavering the light,
perfuming the distasteful until it smells like truth.
4
Antique Pelops, I, gendarme of history,
will tell a different story, your own,
from the one we know so well.
Remembered stories are oftenest incomplete.
And so the smoking future casts its reddened eyes
in foul, obscuring glances upon the past,
picking tinsel souveniers of life from behind the
cinema
where all is mere fantasy, mere image,
a palimpsest of trash, a tumult of conflicted lights.
But note: the dicing gods that roll our winking fate
still will take blameless kisses
from our pinched, upturned lips.
Once your daddy Tantalus had all the gods
to banquet;
on puddled Sipylus chanting boys
with flowers on their brows
piled high the festal boards.
In such strange wear he soon recalled
the giddy eats of paradise,
watermelons, corn mash and obscurer fruits,
table scraps
lounging gods had fed him
from the diviner scrapings of their kitchen counters.
Soon enough the afternoon went skittering,
eaten, into night.
Posiedon elbowed his carven goblet to the grass,
inspired, desiring you, overwhelmed
with but one desire, seeing you,
a child having trouble with his snag of grapes.
A golden horse,
and then the Olymic gates.
You stood half-gowned on awkward feet,
same as Ganymeade, who rode up, in olden times,
in the cupping palm of Zeus.
5
Frowning searchers came back piecemeal,
palms up at dawn
before your silent, shadowed mom.
Their plastered calf-hairs glistered
in the awaking dews,
where horney feet did stamp
sun-ruddy in the mingled dirt.
Then a nosy neighbor, nattering,
teething his speculative peach,
made his ominous pronouncimento:
"Seems the gods got him, in their savage grab,
percieving in his delicate figure on the grass
a prime rib turning cartwheels
to damp their dabbling nap-a-kins."
and set down his glass.
6
From such savage gods I stand savagely apart:
'Barbarous,' as a god-calumny, alertly sits
one safe, dog-eared page away from 'blessed'
in my book. Let spoofed 'hubris' remain
the final word snickering slanderers
diligently emmend to marr their epitaphs.
Olympia's beaming parentage, in brilliant togs,
tossed their darling Tantalus on whitened knees:
in this teeming spate of tender smacks,
he sipped a surplus bliss from hairy teats, and poured
a too-great too-sweet weight of honey in his guts,
sugaring-over his sicklier fate, until
its amber gobbets came punching past his throat,
to cloud in morbid solids the anxious air
above his angry head, his beatled brow, and become
an unbalanced boulder impossible to toss.
He himself induced the rocky cross
he had to bear, stealing the deathless nectar
mid-air upon their bony knees, of the gods.
With this he spritzed immortalizing mickeys
in the meads his thirsty mates held high, held high.
But the spotting gods from their scudding clouds
kneeled down, and spotted him, imbibing
ambrosial dews
that he had stolen, his one deluded theft,
shouting immortal toasts among his mates.
So much did they construe. Against impertinance
they set their heavenly trines in shapely series,
pricking imperilled Pelops back down upon
the dying lists of men, spelled in blood.
Only the self-deluding attempt to delude the gods.
7
But when startled adolecence came loitering,
stiffing his naked cheek with nigger whiskers,
he thought, in leafy autumn, befitting thoughts
of simple Hippodameia, a dimpled Pisan maid.
He thought her melted-butter looks and locks
of braille,
unfingered, a clicking fit for his once-open book.
He turned first
to the turning pages of the turning sea,
throwing thunderous odes against the verbal edges
of the waves. A radient trident
stabbed a terrored instant above the blacking clash
until subtle Posiedon, stridently serene,
came bubbling up between the smacking gravels'
filial polyuphloisbios.
8
"This watery hissing of the waves,
the youthful lines of moonlight, mysterious
across their advancing backs, all that
adventurous confusion of the light
floods me to one resolve, yet wavering.
I ask Oinommaus' dreory spear be tipped in rust;
thirteen bachelor charioteers have formed, so far,
of their aching sides unwilling sheaths.
But why live or die at all, without nobility?
Old men die spineless, and in squat shadows fall,
unexploited by their one-time sun of youth.
Let Aphrodite find me handsome, if she can,
flinging the victorious reins like seaweed
to Hippodameus' pale, impaitient hands."
So Posiedon came, in disgorging rains,
and left behind, dropped from his culminating storm,
as dew-destiny, Pelops' winning steeds.
9
Oinommaus' handsome hands hung down
useless to pursue
where his hale daughter Hippoameia,
ladylike, hopped
beneath the wine-colored covers of Pelops' bed.
In their purple afternoons of marriage-time there came
some half-dozen resultant sons
of resolving hues,
each one a cure for some different dark.
Pelops is dead and he is happy.
Crowds of rowdy men
populate his worship,
muddying the ford at Alpheos.
His flaming altar streams merrily
with a very tangible ichor,
displaying undaunted scuds of smoke
to remotest quadrants.
The glorying ray
of that first, irretrevable Olympiad
shines completely, shines ceaselessly
above the bruise of toil
wherever chariots roam their universal hulls
in competing daylight.
The winner rests his contented eyes
like a speckless gecko in the sun,
ignorant of death,
fanning his drying hair
victoriously.
10
One day or night's solitary concupiscence is
all of goodness we may ever bear or guess.
Aiolian rhythms proclaim from moving hooves.
Now my new song rides at the horses' necks,
pluming the tumultuous beauty of my lord.
No part of intruding duty, but portioned joy, is it
to clearly chant his praises, unconfused.
O Hieron, the shimmering gods themselves
keep sight
solely to watch your bright ambitions' track,
traducing darklier evanescences of night.
11
If you do not go abandoned by those above
wheeling triumph will keep reeling at your side.
I pray my tongue remains capable of praise
as we ride green nights together
on up the Hill of Time.
The Muse has knocked back her golden arrow
to send aloft this heightened rhyme.
Your gaudy kingship crests
the stars themselves by my vocal permanence.
But let us negate, for now,
such niggling peering into the beyond.
For the time we have, walk on, walk high,
in your resistless hullabaloo;
And I'll sit forever in the winners' circle
blowing my melodious breath
upon each pared rainbow of my fingernails.
Final Phrases
If after grandeur, disappearance,
If, after all this splenetic ascent,
The crippled aftermath of a fall,
Less and less intense, among such
Bright, abstract things, then what?
What low-watted misapprehension,
What fatal fault or suborning error
Still all awhirl in the mystery,
The furious cauldron of un-become,
Spicy broth of untasted potentials,
First recommended to the infant sense
The haphazard and mistake of birth?
What wry ointment in what creative eye
Thumbed from the numb terror
Of inexistence, this existence?
This houseless maundering among
Syncopated rubble, this shy twist
Of a fast-disappearing, evanescent fate?
Erratic twirl of wounded imaginings,
Soporifics poured in a killing cut,---
Inflicted birth, the eccentric squeeze
From nothingness to somethingness,
A human caw among perished isles,
Nearly silent against the sea's
Greek, inanimate suavities?
What was in the cherished river,
At first, to flood us from the womb,
What in the dry blue mountain
To pile us up to the height,
The convulsive height, of birth?
Why was there something of us,
Some tenuous insisting among pecked grain,
In all this pervading nothing?
Why begin, with a glittering cry,
To speak of the shine of Things
Among all this annihilated rot?
Why begin, and breathe, and breathe
Until lungs revolt and breath secedes
Gasp by gasp, to finality?
Why this compelling fragrance,
This last stink of a terminal sweetness,
This blanketing panache come home
To impelling nostrils,
Why this, why this, among all
The universes of nothingness
God had heretofore imagined,
Singular monarch in his cloudy sublime,
Unpopulated paradise filled with rocks?
And if we are all of mere spirit tweaked,
Smacked rat-a-tat from the celestial,
Like clean water from a clean tin can,
If so thin a strain of the etherial,
Then what is in our exiled spirits
Fleshed to the daily endeavor we construe
To make us weep? What acrylic inch
Of our invisible divinity uninvisibly
Will manifest to measure our wash of sorrows?
What interior tide pushes us to tears,
Continual tears in a plangent land,
And not one sorrow forgotten
But a new sorrow returns, like spring,
Ever-freshening the sadnesses
We pursue? Why this continual cry
If in our essences we are deaf?
Does the grandest theme weep
For the splattered litter of notes
That bodies it from the tearing page?
Did a charming lietmotif ever
Spare a tear for the plucking hand,
The arranging brain, the fostering voice?
I have slept, and now arise,
Vacuously awake in a vividness of dawns,
Apruptly up with an enhancing vigor,
And, among the snickering trinkets
Of bedtimes past, with a vocal flourish,
Dimly echoed to the listening esplanade, sing
A more manful, arising phrase. I,
A shattering light against the pharisees,
Those blocking and those blacking hacks,
The unresting interrupters, sprung
Enjambments of clear locutions,
Sponges at the garrolous baptismal font,
Eager drinkers of accidental holy waters,
Theives of waterfalls and decoy reliques,
False trophies of the miraculous
Our spurrious loves disguise
As saving revelations: I arise.
Out of these body-heavy hours, crowded
With the torturous splendors of a dream,
Out of these distorting caves and caverns,
Out of this loud and proud now
My tiredness had supoenaed
To that clogging court unconsciousness,
Out of sinister blackness like an arrow
Plumed with snicking lights,
Out of simple silence like a siren
Roaring unresisting reds,
Out of my bones, my very bones,
Mutible and hollow,
Like a tenderly fluted note,
I arise.
Now in my found bower,
I survey its contemplative shades,
Its confectionary greys
And half-fabricated half-darks
Where I had pretended meditation.
Shipwrecked in my spousal house
And torn down from splendid heaven,
A castaway spasmed from the completed Ideal
Kicked into the gestured frescoes of the real,
The half-completed wall done half gold, half
A caribbean pearl of spic splashes,
So white as to blind the eye,
So warm as to melt the memory, diminish
Sheeted winter to piebald April.
Here I yawn awake in arousing play,
Dandling argent dasies, spooning
A million raw julips on one tongue,
Improving my tenor to a rafterless sky
A swept blue of renewing heights,
An up without a top, capless
As my sheering serenity,
My full bloom of honey flooding
From each minutest flowerlet:
Intention devoutly touching intent at last.
All alone in glory I live
Who am a speaking spirit to the things
I rack and ratchet blindly about,
A ghost of irresistible force
To the hesitating, quick quill,
A god of wind blowing pansies
In their inscrutible purples,
A thing of merit, and a demon of note
Proffuring awful caresses
In trade for the one syllable 'love.'
From my fleur-de-lis bedding
I stretch, intensely lazy,
Moving a few less-than-useful
Pussywillow sprays away, that mark
My makeshift ark with their velvets.
From here I peer far past the small
Eloquence of the 'merely' personal
Steering to the vertigineous exact,
The brightening verities of the sky,
Sting of stars, the cosmic whip
And nagging lacerations of the real,
All the subsuming finite, intricate,
The thousand wavings of detail that finishes
The uncertain infinte, the expressive sense
Of still-to-do and yet-to-do
And not yet done, the pang
Of manyness, and pule of puny
Maybe, become the plum of one,
The glistering artifact in the bowl
Of the out-there Eternal.
And when I wake, and my bleak eyes see
In all this catastrophe of light
One dark soul only, definite as night,
A mute, ruminating being
Treading the solitary rhododhendrons, as if
Veritable miracle floresced
Somehow darkly among the pinched
Blots beyond his pinching fingers,
A corpse marauding the roses,
His cadaverous reaching after fragrance
Shaping the desired dark by his questioning,
A pornography of death
Flopped on the living divan,
There, in the branching rhododhendronish
Dark, I in my bed mutter wonder:
Is this the result of hugeness
Inaptly confined, a gigantic dwindling
Into the narrow coffin of the senses
Of all the airy wideness of a soul---
Stuffed in five cramping fingers,
And those fingers resolutely shoved
Into a single, shrunken glove?
I do not know what answer I would make
Seeing this blacking thing of shadows,
Mate to the doggish nail that has dug
At its own fascinated creation,
An insincere earth sincerely debauched
By a passion more real than its consequents,
A living verb among dead lilies,
A certain sound of parable, evoked
From the incredible waste,
Arbitary horizon and guessed-at bound
Scribbled against the infinities,
A scholar's seperation of the dark
Into dark and dark, a delineation, too,
Of fantastic lights, where only light
And higher light, and a lowness
Of light only and always are.
What are these parings and portionings,
These niggling splits
And uneasy chafings, these soaps
And chromy shavings of eternity,
The selfsame immensity that we are, too big
And brave a thing for ladies' mittens,
The parasol of sight and leaf of ear,
Shade of smell and shadow of touch,
Forever less than the elephant they gloze,
What are they all to us today,
In this dizzying second above the chasm,
This pirouette upon a gyroscope,
This rustle of meaningless papers, chime
Of windy whim, cast of fate,
What do they mean, and how,
How, how, how, mon frere,
Do those puffs of meaning manifest?
How do we come to degraded meaning
Out of sincerer wish? How descend
From the very portico and pitch of heaven
To the quixotic swamp of decided good?
What winces in the hero's nerve
That makes the paradisical damsel, saved,
Less than his own, and grandest,
Saving gesture? What gets her, though beautious,
Reduced to an incident, a paltry
Happenstance recorded in a tapestry,
Less herself, both in and of herself less,
Than the skillful weave that retrieves her,
Summons her narrative beauty to the orb,
The goldenest orb, of sight, saved again
From the final damnation of the unsaid thread?
Is it that she is a noun merely
And not a verb, a paraphrase of greatness
And not the great thing herself,
Her motive being and selfsame source
Never troubling the trumpets'
Victorious ogling of her story,
Louder and louder, at her paraded reception?
And yet all about me now I see
Splendid unsayings of these themes,
The gilded weave picked bald,
The hero maligned and maid discomfitted,
Returned to glory in a rustic nave
Of beaten seashells and scratchy quartz,
A bare displaying of simplicities
Fit for neither homily nor hymn.
These mutainous eviscerations
Of life's sparse leavings,
The brindled curd and the voluble leaf
Begging after silence with one last word,
And sighing for revelations as once
Their own profuse confusions they pursued,
Going to the interior nothing
And producing, like an avid paramour,
The true, universal gem, a sum
Of themselves and of their mystery
Only the questioner questioning
Could, from blank possibility, create:
The Macy's diamond rummaged, ex nihilo,
From a cape. What good has ever come
From living in the smallest world
Or raging for the tiniest chime
In all the unreeling Appalachiens
Of our august symphonies?
Splendor, nothing but splendor
Tattoos the groaning soul, pricking
Aptest testaments in the flinching skin.
This is our inception and our destiny,
Despite these shrinking meanderings,
These mangled sayings of the small
And mousy praises of the infintesimal,
This obscuring appetite for tiny
Registered among our surrounding large.
Am I nothing, nothing more
Than the mere instance of a theory,
A fabled example or hypoteneuse inked-in?
No, my soul! But the decision for good
And the good are not the same thing.
Saying a word and meaning a word
Are seperate instances of things
Mere contrivance can never finally tie;
Starry shatterings clump against my hand.
To imagine an end is not--
Fortuitous proving of eternity!--
To come to the end. We have said
Everything at one time or another.
I say again that saying is not
To mean. If it is not to mean,
Then what is it to have said at all?
The expressing wish, the tink
Of tink-a-tink-tunk, the song
Of the garroted voice, the sole
Ululation of various mutes,
The single thing of diversity,
The only theme purloined
From the myriad mashing of myriad notes,
Is this: I live! Any heart, any love,
Any word whose empty impulse I move
And by passion alone redeem
From the meaninglessness that ensconces,
The disordered view packed up
In ordered sight, all wild night held
In the spilling instance of my vision,
Discovery and instance unified
As the blowsy seed, once watered, spurts
To the mastering citadel of the tree,
And its great discordance veiled
By a will that gives as it commands:
"Hear my soul, and speak my plea:
I create the paradise I pursue,
Enlivening each green-new bud
With untroubled blood. Tender,
I sense the soft furl of each
Leaf asleep in its seed.
Seedlings, unfurl! Is it strange
To live once loved, and never die?
Live but once alive, and eternity is thine!
I am most myself when you are me!
Enter this heart palpitant
And take the living light
Heaving there: It is given!
And every blushing rose of heaven
Has my blood on its cheek,
Thorns its redness to a glory
By my own, as you shall dip and grow,---
With a lover's insistence,
Swelled world, now allow
My bending face this kiss,
Though it may be with bloodied lip;
I crave such missed wishes, which,
Forever untold, unwhispered,
Become prayers recinded
As if God had hindred
All love gave. O!
In this presence of peace
Forgive me for loving
In pure reminiscence
Each future unrewarded kiss
You will decide not to kiss.
All flush giving's removed,
Washed to dust by mere 'having,'
So cold is your loving.
Never absent in wishes
Is this tenderest of touches:
Grave world, I am giving
More resolute loving-- unstriven--
Than you in your sorrows
May ravenly raze from me,
However you harrow
My soul's own simplicity!
I toss my angel haloes to blackened souls,
Burnt wrecks and hulks of matchsticks,
Haphazard of my lightness,
For I cannot choose but float in light
While in this dizziness I live:
Beauty has a power
All goodness to endow
Once lifted from its bower.
Beauty is a thing as once its dreamed.
Ever, eternal,--- once lived, undying."
Before The Nuptials
Before the nuptials, cymbals, symphonies, hush
Crash of love, hymn-praises, sermons, laughs,
Filthy snickerings in the red, rowdy pews,
Song-sighs choiring a crush of one from these
Million-loving tongues, faith saying fleshes
Supposing combed words in a racking wind's stir
That tears away all, and in thronged All suspends
This auroraed bride's brindled veil swaying simple
As kisses, warm as dew, and undone as air,
Morning-lifted in outrageous altar light
To never flutter crippled from heaven's harsh shut
Blues, bouyed amber, eternal, where bride
and groom,
Skyey twins all tall among May's constellations,
Titter back at the spatter-smack of stars
Flaming wishes against God's dark, kids again
In the coaxing hour of sun and honey, kids again
In the awake time, when time, once won hoverdom
Of love, I, an unready singer sing,
My smile all smiles slimly seamed in dawn's silver
Who takes as bud-beginning this thistle wish:
That no doom of flood will drown down
Their happy miraculous town of rough, bright starts
Where every memory's a story, absent clamped
endings,
And evergreen sprays nail the cross doors wide
Open to Spring's blessed day, its fever of ferns,
Prodigious boy and girl of the honoured hours
Before the widow's long black walk of hurt,
Or spark-eyed child's mewling through the roof,
Your joined joyed hands, spry fives, numb tumblers,
Work all love's agued locks aghast to lift
Each crowbarred heart's cement hatch at last.
Here to the tying place, the trying place, the tryst-
Twisting lamp circle center, where startled guests
Gored with gifts arrive scurrying to hear
Each undead, annointed syllable, come!
Ear the merry sojornings of two souls twirled
In wedded love, eat the feasts buried in their eyes
Who dance forever the loose measure of their lives
By shafted Cupid pinwheeled to their pulse,
Gifted girl and lucky lad, who curse not
Their execution's unsteady stay on earth,
Who prick scrimshaw ivories of their imagined world
Or conga roaring Amazons to their flowing feet,
Going together their blood-bearing travels
down the tongue,
Prayering every impossible grace like a thirst
Or swearing all paradise in a parched swallow,
So becoming is it when time-twining lovers
Forswear all long agony's terrored second
To, one witching minute in the weather, become.
Come syllable and bell! Come harmony and drum!
All squeaking rivers come rushing to cry
Down to a ministering sea, its flak of salt
That washes away all sours, and delivers Love.
Somber before the deacon sober, fresh in his
ash suit,
(With all the names of friends mooing from
creaking pews,
Clenching soggy knees to see, spooned the froth
Of agitated life at their Sunday service, once,
And buffooning faces at its bitterlessness)
The sugar man and sugared woman approach
their lord,
Who is Love, and none other, whose breath is caught
In kisses they give each other, whose combining
Tongue utters whatever their bodies have said,
Not blindly divine from the crimped mind down
But holyeyed up from the awkward fact of things,
And wetly skyward fountains heaps of blessings.
Never could my hobbled praises jump to where
Their slowest heel pinned a hunching wing,
For they are heaven's couple, and leap lights----
Marooning Einstein's murmured knowing, crowned
Spendthrifts of forever's free eons, and of this
One day's redding rose, thorned before, but now,
In upright nakedness is: a blossom wholly blossom.
And here the stanzaed lovers stand and wave
Forever young against the grain of any decay,
Sprung above by solacing lungs and gold loins,
Primed in the unenvying noontime to use
Their smallest wasted hours in largest ways,
Fondle doubts like aches out of their living skins,
And glow all loving-full all afternoon.
And when all the lead-legged world can stamp for this
Magic miracle minuet its dancing due,
Subliming hates by carefree steps to some
Near perfect finger dance of tippling care,
Then forever's monotony will kneel to bliss
And every sky-cast instant will fly us round to this:
Sugar lovers tilting on their cake to kiss.
Coda
I know existence is a marriage feast
Unfit for man, forgotten by that beast,
Ravaging the ripe, autumnal mind
Full of all earth's soft glories, yet unkind,
Zeroed to a null harvest at another's hand.
Temperence is in the tempest
Harboring one more 'tomorrow'
Blown alive in the face of sorrow
Out of dessicate death's million dusts.
O why's the uneasy soul demand a 'must'?
I come, no new thing conceiving,
But each old love reprieving
From the insuperable dross,
All our tangled fishing lines of loss,-----
My own fingers the tireless loom, of course.
And O! my loving heart's a thief
Of joy eternal, never grief;
Smothered pallor of Loneliness lies in the gutter
Abandoned by the dark sorrow that brought her
Into the bleak depths that sought her.
But what spiked heights shall I discover,
Fledgeling to my ariel brother
Whose proud hoof propounds the clouds
And whose sweet voice, crying aloud,
Creates the very heaven he would found!
Near these besting wings I flutter,
Next to this compelling voice I utter
Who had no words or choice before,
But lay asleep to the resounding score;
Misprision alone my only noted lore.
Unscroll the limitless script
In heart-words from love-lips
Of rolling golds of possibility!
The sky itself does not descend
But rises in mighty, human orisons.
Spelled in platinum, lightning-arced in whites,
Is every syllable of our plight;
Every disastered crash of thunder
Charges rapid hearts with wonder
No sound or terror will ever vortex under.
