Specter
by Frank Watson
I am the god who fought for you,
Wandering Osiris, my kin, enslaving foes;

You have tasted nature’s brew,

Forgetting what once held chance in throe.


What I see amid the gauze and gusts

Is life in prism distended,

Rotting monuments turned to dust,

Sanity, identity—prayers suspended.


You slipped the core, fighting duality;

Black and white, yin and yang,

Alien memory, a debt of brutality—

But what, Osiris, amid the dirt, went wrong?


You stood beneath the temple walls

Reading recorded time in tablet glyphs,

But all you remember from symbolic halls

Is a woman—dried Egyptian, painted stiff.



Note: allusions to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, “Ozymandias,” and Daoism.


All writings and translations are Copyright © by Frank Watson, also writing as "Blue Flute" (2011-2014).
Year: 
2012