“These Strands”

“These Strands”

These strands are ever sleek as t’were silver threads
Extending along lines raked, inclined, declined from nowhere
To everywhere, yesterday’s profits priceless and as final as the fare.
Unless effortless, what is said,
Declared or promised is spiked, a dénouement
Before the climax, a climax before
The action. Friction’s hoards
Exist as particles scattered by natural endowments
In the winds ever upward as sure as jet streams on a cloudless day;
Circumstance and exigency rise high above the nimbus, notions starred
Briefly cross horizons confined below the congregation of cosmic scars,
Nether territories of a lasting grace, the space above the noisome fray
Howsoever bound as portions of the earth wherein are sown
The greatest and least in multiples of immortality the world has ever known. Little significance reigns on whose lips the visceral reaction recalls
As truth or what the colour of the robes of hoards who pause
To listen to the calculated phatic mumblings of pundits of the day.  Whose laws
Call forth the measured adhans’ five-fold mantra from the minarets that draw
Upon so mindless a multitude?  Who, then,  was it met the woman at the well
And told her every last thing she’d done? Who by now does not see
That in the raising of a cabbie’s meter or the parson’s purse comes praise to ease
The laboured journey of nameless a pensioner intoxicated by this living hell?
Congregations cull their tawdry seeds of unity in ancient storage for some small
Act of charity that no one in the highness of Tibetan caves
Would notice is splendid intercourse at tea for spinsters in Vermont who salivate
In guarded whispers on salacious odes to grease the priests whose caterwaul,
Recalls the muezzin raised above it all in shibboleths of mitigated light
Through synagogues, mosques, and churches festooned in antiquated rites.