The Hour of Sacrifice
You are alone before they kill you.
Sacred before they kill you.
Barbaric and speechless as a bear,
you are a bear parting the forests
out of hunger. You have hands
for eyes, and you have a fine wire
where your mind should be—humming
with voices that shuttle their whispers
perpetually along its shining metal.
You are forsaken before they find you
as a music-box lost in the rubble
of a ruined city, long after the child
who owned it has died, and when
they find you you are more forsaken still.
Because they will open and chew
something so precious they don’t understand,
because they have forgotten in their histories
what it means—a magic seed.
Because they have forgotten, you cannot
be betrayed. There is no one to know
that betrayal but you, and you are busy
putting out your eyes, putting poison
below the trap-door of your tongue,
that door which opens always to inwardness.
Child, you are alive now and your heart
beats low. The smallest drum in this place,
in this apartment empty on the far side
of the city. There is still time
to hove out of here and vanquish your enemies,
biblically, with epic bloodshed,
time to call down the curses of the world
upon their wretched heads, but you let
the moment escape from you like gas,
you let it pass like clouds over the face
of a mirror, which afterward forgets
such an event ever existed.
It’s as if you are waiting. Like I said,
you are alone before they find you,
in this empty apartment on the city’s far side,
listening to the smallest drum sputter and cry.
**
Monica Ferrell’s first book of poems, Beasts for the Chase, received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Read the Rumpus review.
