Heart Of Stone Poem by Herbert Nehrlich

'Salut', he yelled from his high horse,
as they descended on the path of
narrowminded, eclectric avenues.
With ginger steps and chestnut hide
a pleasant sound surpassed itself
among the cobblestones of time.

There was no end to perpetuity,
a lonely metronome was vacillating,
attempting to break into ventriloquy
quite simply out of boredom, and
half-timbered houses echoed
the patter of those devilish hooves.

There never was the music of a voice
that should have welcomed him,
regardless of how late it was for all,
only the smell of death had been aware
of its own throes of hurt and speechlessness,
as if it were a giant secret to be kept
from man and beast alike, subdued
beneath the loam that once had nourished,
and sustained the promise of mankind.

Who was the bearer of the word Salut,
who chose the narrow path on chestnut horse?
Had time itself created, an apparition,
and was the smell of death the sound of sad
but illusory images, the lifeline to extinction?

A sound that shattered bones and last illusions,
a slip caused by the cracks between hard lines,
no softness waited for the weary warrior now,
and when the silence had returned as haze
dead eyes observed and feasted lovingly
on what had fallen, it was a heart of stone.