My Lady

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

My lady hides her precious face
under the busiest thoroughfare,
a conveniently frantic place
where bustling humanity
mostly fails to suspect her presence.

She lies deep down
under soil, under grass,
an unctuous bacterial bloom
fed by a rank discharge of effluent
suffocating her sanguineous smile.
Her sweet but ever vengeful kisses
are frozen in mummifying limestone
pitted by centuries of dripping water
and stained by peat, by time -
she has all eternity to contemplate
the lengthy process of decay
and the sundries of castigation.

My lady's pallid smile is concealed
from the eyes of the profane,
eyes that can never hope to see
her glorious inner sanctum
hewn out of solid bedrock
and capped with granite slabs
by the calloused hands of men of renown
tattooed with inscrutable symbols.
Those canny priests of old were
unerringly committed to her cause,
a cause persecuted from day one
and misinterpreted by all
but the long departed shining ones.

Time passed slowly for my pretty
once her Halcyon days ran dry.
Darkness born of grim necessity
has smothered her lovely face
for nigh on four thousand years,
and the glint in her glassy eyes
was hidden all too well.
The invaders blanketed her fearful
but undeniably mellifluous visage
with a mask of beaten gold and malachite
shaped without the touch of steel;
they fed her the blood of innocents
in a sapless attempt to milk her
extraordinary strength, but they paid
the price of that infelicitous error.

Now my lady lies snugly
down, way down beneath
our unsuspecting feet
in a nest of twisted ash roots
lined with cold, flaccid fungi.
Lack of light and the absence
of any beholder conspire
to erase the subtle flavour
of the relic's callow smile,
but in my heart I can never forsake
her luscious honeysuckle kisses
and her lust inebriated memory.