Lonely in Its Reckoning: Seventh German Spy

 

 

 

The Folly

The German Spy

 

 

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Lonely in Its Reckoning

 

Agnes justified on the day of her promotion

The old women to her sister’s marriage filing

The church gained down pitched channels

Mostly arid, stepped by feast and famine

Fiery sky…and flood

Fiery sky

And flood again    neighbours dressed in veils

Veils cindered hues of ash flow

Dressed in veils themselves    neighbours

Side-footing under eaves marked with the eye of fate

Wool-clad, clad in sombre wool, for the hills here made no yield

The hills here

Everywhere this island bone-rock splits at drives of deluge

Autumn rains

And the dear olive, the patient olive grows here

The patient olive tender cultivated grapes

Unmarried girls stole glances bending drawing water

Hand not stopping play over ropes so cautious

Of vanity and of the Watchful

And wondered…never voicing syllables in hearts

There, even, envy had its ears

Wondered if that face had beauty

Why sparrow, her mother said

Why you are not so ugly

Her spirit was the spark of a live coal

Porous grey and near to dying

On the day of her promotion

She’d at last been shown the game

but

These were not the days of the old women

Agnes had crossed the century

to the continent and the city

And the face, as the mundane Mr. Serna said

Became her passport

 

And the flesh, in a place of verdancy

Wants its own

There is a kind born to this

But the flesh, lonely in its reckoning

Lies not where Agnes is

 

 

 

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Lonely in Its Reckoning

Men (first)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2018, Stephanie Foster)