The Forge of Spirit

The Forge of Spirit

I lie in a writhing rapture, a baptism of fire.
A dire dilemma, I am condemned
and Called forth from amorphous.
For but a molten moment
I muse upon the myths of the Smith ...
Before I am laid at a loss upon the Philosopher's Stone.
Alone, draconian, ironhanded, I am commanded to the anvil.
Still and stretched across an iron and inclement plain, it rains and rings vehement.
The firmament fills with Falling Fate.
Irate, the Hammer smites and steals my light.
Arrayed, fey in its stolen stain, it paints the day and night.

Read these, these sparks,
cast off in argent arcs,
murmurs and mirrors of my pain.
As I slowly shift form,
I bleed seeds of the storm,
my tears they form the rain.

In ardent ache,
the glowing Hammer rakes the horizon in daybreak,
and leaves the eve gloaming in its wake.
I feel the maul of Days, in an incandescent haze.
Unending the descent, in an ever nascent clamor,
my Voice, my Name drowned in the sound of the Hammer.

In amber lambence
the rain rages ruddy wrath,
in dire iron aftermath.
I am but an afterimage
a dim imprint,
a silhouette etched against a plangent anvil.
Amid a sanguined clangor...
A deafened heaven succumbs
as the moon and the sun become one,
in a scarlet arc that inscribes the sky.

There in the burning air a rainbow glows,
it shimmers in all the colors of crimson.
So am I limned... In all the colors of darkness I shine.
Beneath the Sign of the Painbow, amid the echoes,
in between the keening crack of thunder,
I wonder, what I am to be?

Kept bereft in darkness' bliss, the artifice of the Smith, is all I know.

I can recall so little before the Fall.
Bitterly condemned...
Maligned in iron
consigned to the Fire
Reborn in the forge.
Before that I think... I was a sword.

Now I am naught, misshapen,
as I am re-wrought in the fires of creation.
In a chiming chant, sparking fulgurant,
again caught in the din of another's sin.
I cannot see the Bell, but I cannot escape it's Toll.
The ringing is becoming a part of my soul.

The artifice ever shifts amiss,
molded and folded, twisted and turned, then returned to the fire.
Then abruptly, the wrench in quenching, frigid shock.
Drenched almost drowned in an icy loch.
Re-deafened by the sound of silence.

In a moment's blessed rest,
in respite, I am assessed in and by a Lesser Light.

Then in lucent lux, again into the fiery flux.
To flicker in the mother liquor of souls.
Obsolescent in descent,
a soul learns its lessons in incandescence.
Reborn in the dire fire of scorn.
Then poured at last, downcast and cast,
the future speaks with the voice of the past.

Ill enamored of the Hammer, I am not armor.
Nor thus poured can I be a sword.
And although I will not yield, still I am not a shield.
I am made to bear despair. And bear it well.
I'll return my pain in a singing refrain.
I am a BELL!


Copyright Luke Michael Owens
- June 30, 2001