street song for Edith Sitwell
David McLean
even the skeleton is not forever,and the good night that flakes flesh
away, falling like fading snow to the decay
that eats the sorrow that is life
and the death we store in our granaries
of weapons' harvest—that night shall
gnaw the naked bone to dust, the bone
that hungers not for lithesome peace
but to feel the meat fall piecemeal
as it writhes to nothingness again;
and the Bone is not silent but screams
in me its sadistic duty, the dismembering
in its jointed sinews and that dull truth
that shall hang in the wounded dying sky
its pale lesion, white eroded beauty
eaten by its own truth—
our lives that die mad as the moon