Kyrie Eleison Poem by Denise Antoni

The bay flames, a brazen chalice.
Come and haul from its wine-dark words
All the Old World's boasting promise,
The vintage, pearly, twilit hoards.

Coins cupped in a spongy hammock,
Sea-blacked fingers clutching the cross.
Touching the salt-smoked wreck
The ribcage swirls away to dust.

Those great ships split like oysters
As scrap-feathered gulls shriek their prey,
Treasured names that choked old sailors -
Benedictus, Santa Maria, Miserere.

We do not heed the sky's cold blood,
The sea's inflamed chalice,
The bay's hot rise on time's red flood.

For our plundered, plastic, gilt-edged creeds,
For this new world's foiled and empty promise,
For our squandered, twisted, bankrupt deeds,
Have mercy on us.