Send the palace aids for packing,
Palisades to fend the night;
Where we’ve been there’s nothing lacking,
Nothing lacking but the fight —
Fighting on the hills and beaches,
Down along forgotten glades,
Schisms of a higher order,
Battles on the palisades.

Here’s a girl who’s lost a soldier,
Here’s a boy who’s lost a dad;
Nothing left in gun or holster,
Skies are dark and times are bad —
Comes the sparrow of the season,
Comes the singing of the song:
Time has rhyme, but little reason,
And it never lasts that long.

We believed, and so we sanctioned
Our haphazard ways and means,
But then dieted on plankton,
Whales of turquoise and baleen —
Floundering out in the desert
Not a place for whales to be:
Whales or narwhals all aplenty,
Mired in passivity.

Turned into a sort of painter,
Seeing through the living eye;
Falsehoods that could not be plainer,
Plans that always go awry —
Sketches made and colors tangled,
Love, a tragedy in clay:
Capering among the ruins,
Searching for a hideaway.

Hominids of some distinction,
Tools made out of earth and stone,
Shuffle slowly towards extinction,
Live apart and die alone —
We approach their secret border
Softly as an April dawn:
Schisms of a higher order
Only shown when we are gone.

Voices of eternal caring
Sing in ease their gentle tunes;
We have long been sorrows bearing,
Carved by hand in ancient runes —
Melodies and sacrifices,
Hearts and heads and hands that fail:
Then the ship lets up its anchor,
Early winds fill up its sail.

So much honor, and confusion,
So much pleasure and despair;
What we ask for is illusion,
Neither here nor truly, there —
Situations flat and fallow,
Earth untilled and soil worn;
Even aging heads seem callow,
And the oldest barely born.

Send the palace chieftains packing.
Few the uses for their kind:
All our riches leave us lacking,
All our seeing leaves us blind —
We were young once, and commanding.
Steering life by spur and bit –
Schism: us and understanding,
One last higher order

Split