written By
You don’t sing anymore
your bells don’t ring on Sundays
and your icons don’t chant
when the dawn returns from its
walk in the dark
Byzantium is but the shadow of a whisper
that holds your hollow ghost like the dead hold
their bones
your eyes are dry, for life has escaped
through cracks that were supposed
to show pilgrims parts of a heaven
that hoped to be yours
But suns set and moons rose,
so many of them that when people stopped counting
they thought it was an eternity
but you knew better,
the crescent holds no numbers,
no notes, no chimes
Yet, it peeled your name off of the surface of time
– letter by letter
I saw them drip
one by one
like grains of sand through the tight throat of an hourglass
and stood wondering, if you’ll recognize it
when I sigh it to you
Instead, you shrink inside halos
Mary is childless
Christ is without a cross
Who will be saved now?
I dreamt my great grandfather
in front of your gates - weeping
his tears wet my eyes
his hands held my heart in his throat
and I heard the soil sob with souls
that wander through six hundred years
of unsang troparions
then, I thought of the time
when God so loved the world that he gave
his only son
Saint John couldn’t imagine
what God would do if he had to give
his only daughter
More from this Author
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Aida Bode is a Pushcart-nominated Albanian poet and writer, whose works have been published online and in print.
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