The Fifth of November

IN THIS new season of the bud's blue flame
quivering from the Jacaranda's bleak spring silence
in miracles—with birth's intensity—
now, when time releases that same
surge which fleshed September into the fire
of this month, building these dazzling flowers
from the Jacaranda's wait, make this
then, a ceremony of the ominous pyre.
Break terribly these living branches of the tree!
And let me hear the loud death of the torn wood
and know the irrevocability of fire!
High and harsh! Stack high the limbs, that the
tree—which has no leaves but only the only heart
spun flowers—will be crushed from sky into blood
and dry to the ash-waiting waste,
and there dies even the heat of the bright
remonstrance which had split the pebbles in its strength. Thus
make this celebration for me to burn a hardness
and a silence in my heart,
that when I see the
smouldering hills turned seasonal flower and light, as
wide as music, I may be unmoved, knowing
the accessibility of ash, may not protest
the always agony when beauty or when life
shall be destroyed!
O stack the life-filled glowing
branches on the fire, let me hear
the tree's sharp death, and make my heart impassive,
make me dumb to mourn THIS sacrilege.
I must thus prepare myself, for I fear
how I might cry, cry with a straining rage
to burst the towers of my brain as pebbles
in this madness fused by Faulke's still grinning shadow
daring men to an irrevocable sabotage.