EXAMINATION ROOM

Gazing from wistful eyes across bowed heads
I think the lost romantic lover's thought
of when there fluttered in my net
fire-singing-birds,
and I also sang in cords
being content with slavery; of what
in agony has by the iron floods
befallen.  And precipitate longing stirs,
among these endless writers, into tears.

Useless indeed the arrow's backward gaze
and the string broken; the confederate past
stares like a prison from a waste
where I like these
willed excessive masteries,
creating metaphors.  Time now has cost 
a million words, spirits or animal lies;
and they have bought no future, but this less
oh less than strength, this concave watchfulness.

I am to guide these futures, to approve
their common copying of certain steps;
who have pulled ribbons from my lips
for them, for love,
coloured with myself - conjuring life
- and been the Merlin of soaring hopes.
Who now am sitting with them, writing of
the spirit-patterns of the necromancer
till the bell rings on the unfinished answer.
                                                                             GIZA.