Wastelands of watch and hollow
sleeplessness,
Dark servants of an agonised
despair;
Conspiring with him how to wring
and press
Each tortured nerve that writhes
and screams, scraped bare
In grinding bone; to bind within
red pain,
To split the spine upon unreason’s
rack,
Forcing the manic cries, the
tumult tears.
Who has not felt you, night, crowd
coffin black?
Drowsed with the fume of poppies,
all have lain
Broken, torn, and crying to be
whole again?
Cockcrow, false dawn: the pain,
the pain is back.
(March,
1990)
Brief: To write in the style of another poet,
here
Keats and his Ode to Autumn.
