Who the Artisan?

Aghast sped the scion of Paris paramour,
A paramour who in amorous surrender,
Did author Archean and Trojan ruin,
As valiant and vanquished alike,
Were to their makers rendered.

This maiden in flight, towards all parts she whirled and dashed,
Clutching this visitation of violence ‘pon her breast,
‘twas a crescent cut crimson slash,
That ran red.
Besetting the verdure beneath her feet,
Without mercy, without surcease.

Reprieve, not forthcoming,
Her sufferance was a-turning,
in the crucibles
Cruel flame, a-burning,
Yet her lips parted not,
‘Twas her silence that reigned undaunted.

Besides reasoned she,
What needs to loosen agonies scream,
When alabaster hand can assume the aspect,
Of alabaster wing?

This pain is a penance seemly, as such
Should be born meekly,
As martyrs of old met the flail and rack,
Wouldst yield with a bow, so will I allow,
Mouth to become beak of saffron shade,
Crowned by sable ‘pon the brow.

Not sorcery most foul,
Or the devil’s craft,
That corporeal self transmute,
To plumage of snowy hue,
For to aft.

Verbage that she trod afore gave way to asphodel plain,
That with thirsty ardour doth lap the sanguinary offerings of that wound,
A scarlet and white omen of finality which,
Petal by petal bore.

Still to utter nothing, not a sound nor sigh, even with her end manifest and palpably nigh,
An end so nigh,
The most bewitching enticement of all to hasten cloaked figure,
Swathed in somber dethers hence to lay claim.

Whose very entry into asphodel bower from primeval hinterland and into plain sight,
puts all goodly agencies to flight.

None other than he who draws the shroud,
On this our lifes pageant and theatre,
We all share the stage with He,
Though we seldom pause to consider.

With hourglass expired and keen scythe
Trailing her blood in halcyonic meter,
Into His icy limbs, the swan pitched,
heavy and hushed as a stone,
The strength she had heretofore known,
Had anon flown.

Supine creature, guard thy ghost,
For His fleshless visage skulks towards thee,
Breath close,
From deaths fathomless aperture this aphorism was expelled with sardonic scowl,
In a voice to like a cataracts howl,
Sensed the swan with prescient doom,

“When Death sleeps my dear, He dreams of you.”
Her back convulsed in a fit again and again without rest,
Wracking her lithe frame, as if in Saint Vitus dance her body were possessed,
How nails and teeth rend garments rendered incarnadine by Death’s accord,
For in Death this maiden thought herself swan no more.

How at long last,
Her sentence that had for ages endured,
Was lifted, Fortuna conferred.

“Who the artisan!,” she cried,
with her last modicum of main,
and with that her life’s thread were wrested twain.

At hearing this the heavenly sovereign,
The daemon’s govern,
and all that lay betwixt,
stilled for a moment’s passing,
before taking up their charges just the same,
being versed too well in the triviality,
of this ever-lasting refrain.

Leave us withdraw from this perverse pieta-
Maiden and Death joined until judgment on another ‘morrow,
This scene imbued by this swan song,
Reliquary for a maiden’s sorrow.

Leave us witdraw before too long,
Never to know if her glossololia,
Hailed from a known or foreign tongue.