XXVII. The penitent coward

In the fifth gyre of the Age of the Middle Gohlguanarchy:

A bone-linked pair of poets die without heirs in year 13.
Their unrhymed words strike bronze upon a secret chamber
Beneath a vacant labyrinth: two royal monuments
Carved into the skull shape of mummified fetuses
With four miniature faces of goat, ram, boar, stag.

The penitent coward who was never a killer,
A conqueror, or a liberator, finds himself far from his goal.
He becomes the blackskin companion of a hired archaeologist
Whose knowledge of his monstrous subject is unique.

They unearth the abandoned book of a heretic coregent;
This burned and scratched object of temporal power
Seizes weak minds with dreamless sleep and early death.
    

VII. When ring draws upon ring

In the fifth gyre of the Age of the Recluded Star:

When ring draws upon ring in the sky
Towards the right,
The flesh and spirit of the ransomed king wanes
In the growth of the moon's scorched stone heart.
And a new sickle cuts no sharper than the song
Of a skylark besotted with a frost-broken brute.

In one burst gun fate opens for a follower
Of the acorn mage,
Walking with a scroll in the sole of his shoe,
Holding in a bird's-eye glove a blossomless vine
With spined husks from the branch of a barren tree.

Hidden will be the changeling, a rough female
Of one talent,
As she crouches in the round grave of storm-dogged
Loa Mu,
With a tooth in each of the twinned bodies of law
And faith.