The Canticle Of His Intermittent Mercy Poem by Widad Wivelle

In this cloistered hush where my exile festers,
their colloquies glimmer like auroral phantasmagorias,
a cabalistic firmament where my star is absconded.
I am marooned in the interstice,
a revenant amid chandeliers of derision.
Yet—sudden as seraphic visitation—
his utterance cleaves the sepulchral hush.
Each syllable, a hierophany,
falling upon my solitude like chrism on parched reliquaries.
His voice—an ephemeron, tremulous, fugacious—
nonetheless becomes my amphora,
cradling the tincture of not-belonging
with an alchemy almost merciful.
He is the custodian of a clandestine knowing:
my erasure inscribed in the clandestine annals
of their conspiratorial congregation.
Still, he extends toward me
a simulacrum of camaraderie,
a fragile ligature of sound and glance,
tenuous as gossamer filaments
suspended in an ecclesia of shadows.
Cruel beatitude!
To be momentarily conjured into semblance,
as though I too were a tessera
in their mosaic of belonging—
when in verity, I am the lacuna,
the abyssal fissure, the syllable unsaid.
Yet, while his half-light lingers,
the abyss becomes less vociferous,
its fangs sheathed in velvet oblivion.
And my solitude, though still gargantuan,
wears the mask of a gentler chimera.