once more to elysium

Buffeted by a belly burst with rain-bloat,

I’m borne forth —

Chartered on that youthful lap and lull

Which knows no change,

Suffers no swell of age —

That is ignorant of the seasons which raze and 

Raise again,

That sees not the steel-rimmed flues who

Frantically flee their fumes,

Orient the biting brume

In Olympian floorboards, Olympian tombs.

Beyond my eyeline, a womby woodland

Compasses this mere, cradles it —

It does not issue forth from its core men who 

Unthread clamorous wails from their throats

Or strain stunted limbs in cribs they have

Long outgrown. 

Earth’s cot is uncrowded—its children do not 

Itch to unmake the fetid beds of urbanization.

No shrill death rattles resound—rake like wraiths 

Through the balmy-breath`d trees.

Birds beak not dystopian death songs,
Scratching each syllable like braille into

Foam-white and whelmed auditory canals.

In this haven, one communes with Silence.

She who bids you naught but birdsong and

Limitless Time —

Here, Tranquility unrolls the rusted rug at dawn

And unfurls its starlit sister at dusk —

Routine as Christ, who with the

Illumined tapers of his fingertips 

Lights the Apollonian lamp for millennia.

Earth outwhirls its axis, groans beneath

Gangrenous tumors —

And still this lake lies unburdened,

A placid-visaged virgin.

One day the forests will flatline

In faith, the flowers will fall —

Swoon on sylvan battlefields, 

Stretch out on pallets, pale-petalled corpses —

But it is not so today. Not so here.

No…never so here. 

By Emily Milay

Excerpt from “My Words Untethered: A Collection of Poems”