It was the burning of a night fire

It was the glowing of a night fire,
an alias beneath which all things hidden
became a city invisible, and yet seen.
The scene was laid in fair Verona,
or perhaps in erewhon.
It began and arced and ended someplace,
tranfigured one to another one.

Betwixt, bewitched, bewildered he came,
found a queen to be his star,
Setting voyage to rocky lands,
that have sunk beneath the sea.

What progress was then made?
What lakes of ice were melted then?
What water quenched the pounding of the smith?
Or flowered in the first garden land?

Who knows, who knows, who knows.
Que sabe, sabine lusts exposed,
were not all that is left in the failing of the tides.

The faces turned away,
and that brief languid evening,
has become time to mourn
Before it was come
is sterile day.
All that is left, is to think and mourn.

It is the shaken times we live upon,
solid like a rock,
yet rotten to the core.
Founded on waste and want and war,
for want of a liberal thought,
it comes to naught, and nothing more.

The hope of summer reeds
blow by winds of time and touch,
is to give not too little,
nor bend too much,
scattering there, the future's seeds.

Our eyes cast in these fallen times,
for a general there to save us,
for a new city on a hill.
But echoed empty these designs,
only dawn's last piper,
with melody to soft,
and yet to shrill.

Yes it was the burning of a night fire,
an alias for the slumbered need,
that found a second second at the end of sacred hour,
and line by line the real half followed,
where the play's the thing to lead.