XXXI. A map of midwinter stars

In the seventh gyre of the Age of the Shielded Immaltant:

The eighth man laid upon a rough table is the largest object
Within a single niche lighted by wax candles carved
With a red crescent moon and a map of midwinter stars.
This spare form is dressed in ragged and torn cloth,
The raiment of those that are slain by their own hand.

His banner is a yellow sycamore leaf torn and caught under
The wooden haft of a knife sunk deep in a gentle heart.
His feet point towards a door low in the western wall,
Towards a destination that must be reached by discovery.

His head rests on clay bricks stamped with the edge
Of finger-rings.
His legacy bequeaths the stilled heat and light of day,
In four mismatched jars, to forty-four thousand children.
    

XXIV. Lightened by one alone

In the gyre eclipsed of the Shielded Immaltant:

The congregated powers of heaven's antique empire,
Built on eldest faith, tainted by cruelty, stained by blood,
Will make garden cities into a lampless unpeopled world
Lightened by one alone, whose fierce reproach and
Reluctant prayer
Hurls up a tinge of gray in the void world.

Thirty witnesses will return, with thirty infants,
Nameless vagrant dwellers in houseless woods
Walled with witchcraft and flower-inwoven jasper,
Green to the very door of the long absence.

Seven common names of the unextinguished fire,
Stamped onto the frame of twelve windows in one form,
Usurp the codex vigilans of the unremembered throne.
    

III. Within the vanished margin

In the hooded gyre of the Age of the Shielded Immaltant:

A small force of besieged soldiers,
Sent into the midst of a storm of clamor,
Intervenes too late on behalf of the depraved ones;
Marking the empty doors with charcoal and chalk
Within the vanished margin
Of the four-volume epidemic.

A radiant wheel formed by the league of the frostborn
Is offered in wrath against the king
Of unblemished reputation.
A celebrant raven in a false costume
Feeds his infants and usurps his wives

Upon the date of execution, the outland nations
Stand with the obscure youth rising
Against thirty-five years of wickedness.

I. When the noble tribe goes to war

In the second gyre of the Age of the Shielded Immaltant:

When the noble tribe goes to war in a holocaust
Of law,
A true choice can become round and bloody.
When they touch death, those choosing the right hand
Of life,
Decorated by any distinction, by any ornament,
Order silence and denunciation with false songs
Of mourning.

A small kingfisher with a long curved beak,
Her two hands under her chin, she will design
A woman dressed in black, open-headed with
Clean hands; her sister is closed with bittersweet.

Shadows opened up by the eyes and feet of a child:
White, gold and green lose one hundred killed in
This battle,
Four thousand wounded and taken by the black and red.