She has dwelt upon icebergs, a princess of ice;
Has communed with the owl's golden glance,
With the vixen who gambols in tossed iv'ry powder.
Her eye turns again to the dull, yellow sun,
And her ear to the ominous sounds
Of the groaning and cracking, the grinding, slow progress
Of rock-speckled glaciers that pause in their torpid glissandi.
And soon, she assumes, they'll begin their retreat
As the hot waves of darkness pour forth
From the maw of the world to dissolve
Her blithe kingdom of crystalline beauty.
Will the snows on the rivers of ice start to melt?
Will the royal blue hearts start to shimmer, huge gems,
In the silence of gray afternoons?
Now the dimming-down light laves, in soft-pink and mauve,
The long, skeletal fingers of ice pointing down to the valley
Which soon will reclaim the sharp stones of her dwelling,
Ensheathing a shrine in the Northland's chill fleece.
Once the black, ageless spurs of the mountains
Gazed out to observe the clear, wide mountain lakes,
Ringed with shifting Saharas of blown alabaster;
But mercury rises and drops turn to torrents
As signals conflict in the ominous skies.
Now the musk-ox, dressed up
In the uncertain ice as a garment,
Disposes his thick-layered girth on the ground
With a strange, nascent doubt in his piteous eyes.
Does the Ice Princess know
That the evergreen, hunched from the blast,
Soon will shiver and shudder apart in its torment,
Ere invading bright hordes,
Born of liquified flame, rip the mantle of earth?
She is gone......
.......to a dappled, far forest.
A damp, cool, monastical dwelling will shelter the Princess
Until the grave days, when a voice sighs up high in the winds,
And her glistening body, as pale
As the white Arctic hare she's abandoned,
Looms up as a warrior,
Naked to soon-yielding worlds.
Now she drifts near and nearer to slumber's dim realm,
Where the wind-whooshing rustle of rushes
Sighs in through the soft-closing shutters of dream.
In a close-clustered world drenched in emerald green
She dissolves in the sheltering arms of the Goddess,
Who murmurs in deep, plangent tones to her:
"You are the one, my child; you are the one!
Bring it down, bring it down into fleet, hot destruction.
Let ashes remain of the world of the soulless;
Let ashes blow far on the winds you'll unleash
Past the bloody horizon's far verge."
Now is the seal on her brow as she touches,
With tips of her long, lissome fingers,
The waters which cleanse from the fume and the filth
Of an age given over to Thanatos,
World torn apart by the far-raging minions of Will.
And the face and the frame of her, burning straight up
From the depths of the gloom, now are readied for deeds;
And she knows that with Mystery's moon-granted
Shadow for paramour, now is she armored for combat,
And far will her high-arching footsteps descend,
Very far will her deep, witching eyes lure her armies.
She glides from her gloaming; her glance is ablaze
As the wafer-thin shield of the snow-dusted ice
On her pine-girdled pond falls asunder,
And birds of ill-omen on jetty-black wings
Swoop and scream in electrified air.
And it's now in the mayhem outside her sweet cloister
That swirling, delirious, samite-clad girls ring the altars,
To dance there with Maenadic frenzy around spewing fire--
All but one who stares joyously up at the red, smoking heart
Which the priestess commands her
To hurl from the brand to the sky-licking flames.
Then the Night-Crusade roars down the road,
On the gleaming, lithe limbs of the maidens,
To monstrously bloated metropoleis sleeping,
Now sleeping their very last sleep;
For the salt sows the furrows tomorrow.
And there will be time and enough for the tears
Of remembrance when footprints
Appear in the snows once again
At the craggy white roof of the world,
At the dawn of an Age.
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