The Youngest of the Graeae

Listen to my account as the world vanishes:
we were young, my sisters and I,
though withered from birth, our hair gray,
in this land of wavering light,
everything shrouded, the sun banished, the moon in exile.

We had the shapes of swans but we had arms,
under our wings of watered silk
our hands ready to take over
the twilight each time one finished
her ration of sight.

It now is mine, this twilight all mine:
my sisters are dead, and I alone am left
to see these trees, these forests, this ebony ocean.

There were times I would have run away
but Sisters, your dreamless faces stopped me,
the blue smoke rising from your sockets.

And what would have been out there in the world?
Only cages and torturing hands,
someone stitching our eye as a trophy
to a screen speckled with mirrors.

sisters, when I lie
as we did, with my body in the ocean,
my hair thrown like gray waves upon the sand,
I remember what we betrayed
for this twilight.

And I weep on the necks of trees,
praying,

              O God of Light,
before I end this life,
lower your hands into the east
and bring up the sun, once.

                                      (Note)

Of Fire

In a mansion once of love I lit a chandelier of fire ...
I stood on a stair of water; I stood on a stair of fire.

When, to a new ghost, I recited, "Is That What You Are,"
at the windows in the knives he combed his hair of fire.

You have remained with me even in the missing of you.
Could a financier then ask me for a new share of fire?

I keep losing this letter to the gods of abandon.
Won't you tell me how you found it—in what hemisphere of fire?

Someone stirs, after decades, in a glass mountain's ruins.
Is Death a cry from an age that was a frozen year of fire?

I have brought my life here where it must have been once,
my wings, still hope and grief, but singed by a courtier of fire.

When the Husband of Water touched his Concubine of Snow,
he hardened to melt in their private affair of fire.

Don't lose me in the crowds of this world's cities,
or the Enemy may steal from me what gods revere of fire.

The way we move into a dream we won't ever remember,
statues will now move into wars for a career of fire.

What lights up the buildings? My being turned away! O, the injustice
as I step through a hoop of tears, all I can bare of fire.

Soldier: "The enemy can see you and that's how you die."
On the world's roof, breathless, he defends a glacier of fire.

I have come down to my boat to wish myself Bon Voyage.
If that's the true sound of brevity, what will reappear of fire?

A designer of horizons, I've come knocking at your door.
Buy my sunsets, please, for the Pacific's interior of fire.

I could not improve my skill to get ahead of storms though
I too enrolled in Doomsday to be a courier of fire.

"on the last day of one September" "one William was born"
Native of Water, Shahid's brought the Kashmir of fire.

                                                (for W. S. Merwin)