ALSOS

n., Greek origin: 'grove/groves'
--

This grove could be a sacred place.
This grove could be a sacred place.
This grove could be a sacred place,
a place
where an angel announces unto a Mary
where a saviour prays
where some hymns are sung.
It could be a sacred place.

It is not; nineteen centuries
after the Saviour prayed, somewhere
here a serpent has come has slunk has entered
and wormed its way around
these hallowed grounds
leaving its brittle and oozing fruit
strewn about unbridled orange-grass shoots
of clumps and trees
undone by blights and bloated by unheeded
rainy seasons.

Somehow sometime somewhere
the hunger
of Daidalos has sunk its inbred roots in ancient leaves
once turned to sunlight and cool breezes
and here the fester blooms
in forms of algae mould and heat and stink entombs
these bloated trees;

this grove is a thousand mouths to feed.

Festering for ten thousand years, this grove
(called Alsos in the tongue-of-old)
has taken on its ingrown face,
a pock-mark decimated place,
and then
as Daidalos begins to sing the sun’s own hymn,
here the Alsos hears and calls upon him.

Somehow somewhere,
says hungry Alsos, I must say something,
lest the grove beside me overgrow me.
So it calls upon its selfish members
to beget in sodomy a messenger,
finds a partridge, stuffs and covers
it in its mould, sends it off
for getting Daidalos;

and Daidalos
upon arrival coughs
himself to Groves into a bog
and thereby swallowed
is the Alsos.


-r