Memento Mori, Corneille. (La Rêve) Poem by Alison Rosalie

I had not known the importance of a bird
with gleaming feathers painted ebony blue
and eyes so beautif’ly black it was absurd,
But it seemed the entire city was askew.

They dangled the dead crow to my glossy eyes.
From behind the minute comfort of my hands,
I whispered in tears, “The beauty seldom dies,
but it seems so often when evil withstands.”

I watched in shock as they devoured the corvid.
I was a gun in a bed of eight asters.
Afraid to offend, I followed the morbid,
and silently willed, forgiveness, my masters.

Autos lit the lane at time-travel hurry
in a reckless, orderly, rush hour fashion,
but the clock’s face spoke a melancholy ‘three’,
and my lips with the hue of death were ashen.

The fair streets were littered with leporidae
who fled at a precisely accurate time,
and after a meet with Death and corvidae,
I was wise to avoid Fatality’s prime.

But I had to know the mere premonition
that unlucky numbers are always foreseen.
And with numbers come the fated addition:
One and another always equal fourteen.

And so I witnessed from eyes of another
the cruel display of the death of us two.
One grating question my mind could not smother:
The inevitable wondering of you.

Where did we stand unsound on the lifeless plain?
Was it you and I, two birds of a feather?
Were we hand in hand, like in love and insane,
joined at the hip, meeting darkness together?

Were we two jade leaves on a different tree
a different chapter, poem, stanza, rhyme,
stricken soundlessly simultaneously,
though we had not shared the same century’s time?

The latter smiled, it was just one after one-
when you appeared I said goodbye to my breath.
With wings clipped, I tried to take off to the sun
and fire I suffered when the Rabbit spoke “death”.