The Orphan

Sing me the lullaby you used to sing,
The ragged-soft lullaby with tattered-frayed seams.

Oh the night is too long and the wind is too black
And the notes in their graves make the graveyard-trees crack.

Lost children sea-side, their hands and eyes red,
Walk still redder miles till they last find their beds.
My skin was ice cold like the pale smiling moon
Death grew on bones carved from glaciers, and soon
I lost all my flesh to a sea and salt doom.
While I rotted my lungs, tell me, then
Where were you?

Hold sadness so mad that its teeth taste like fear
The sky is so wide and I'm all alone here
The gutted horizon with violet entrails,
Its purple-black blood on the waves and the sails,
I've hollowed this corpse, made a home in its heart
Oh, I kissed its dead walls as I tore it apart.


  
The stars have no tears in that cannibal sky
Though they rage and I shiver, I do not deny,
For all the wide starkness, this sickle swings true-

The stars here are cruel, but not half cruel as you.



Sing me the lullaby we used to sing
Find me its notes if you still know the thing.



My keeper, my reaper; my solace, my dread,

Sing me the song you once sang at my bed-

You left no warm ghost for to sleep in my head.