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Hour of the Wolf


ISSUE:  Spring 2015

 

3 A.M.

Who is awake but the nightwatchman?
Or the grim laborer in the graveyard
Shift? The spirit world is in transit—

Souls of the newdead drift
Like floating lanterns
Over a river woven with ghosts.

Somewhere at the crossroads of night
A man will come to the vanishing line
Of his life. All the world he’s known

Closes into a clock of smoke;
In that final unannullable hour
The self is torn from time and calendar:

Mind undresses from body,
Its clothes of blood and bone.
As it crosses through the door of death

The spirit reaches the lips of the unknown
And sings
Through it:—
Newborn

Into nothingness,
Mind floats through starlight
Like an oarless boat along the coastline.

What is ghost
But the echo of a man
As he roams his native hills and roads and home?

He wears the mist
In his hair,
His voice: the hounds of wind.

This veil 
Between the living and the dead
Is smoke-thin

Here in the wrecking hour of deep night
Where we lie awake and listen
For the white wolf to arrive.

1 Comments

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Rosalyn Marhatta's picture
Rosalyn Marhatta · 9 years ago

Very beautiful and wrenching through mystery. 

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