Of Those Unfortunates' Dinnertime Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Houses falling down beside old cathedrals and
Praying, praying:
Their chimneys smoking until they could be seen
Up in the woods and to the housewives there
Who had run away from them
And turned into naiads and dryads, letting their hair down,
Speaking to the harts who used to be princes
Or kings, now hunted by their fathers or sons:
They stop for awhile at the edge of the curious pool and
There are detained by things who have run away from themselves,
And who are not real:
And thus becomes reason for their demise- their capture, their
Decapitation, and by a round about means, their cuckoldry:
Paraded on the streets by all sorts of tourists:
Decorated with ribbons and bows,
Until their jaws hang down sorrow faced, and the rainstorms
Come and otherwise all of their practitioners go
Indoors:
Leaving them for the crows, who sing to them, and make a merry
Dinner out of their lingering metamorphose,
Their purposeful solitude, and malingering to remember the bodies
Of better men: as the sky kidnaps them,
And the runaway houses pray to their cathedrals smoking up the naked
Bodies of mountains
Where other things live, halfway divine, waiting in their cockpits
Through the swinging testaments
Half mad yet hungry eyed looking down at the macabre carnival
Of those unfortunates’ dinnertime.