' ' ' ' ' Owning Our Own Faces Poem by Dónall Dempsey

Our faces
lie on the grass

white
as bone

our death
masks

drying
in the sun.

Later, they are to be
painted & adorned

(the craft of Art)

but now, it's as if
they have emerged from the grass

ancestors
who have owned these faces

before their ghosts
made them ours.

We lie together

a fallen leaf

between us

gazing at the centuries

the sun parades past us

like a Lord
& Lady

caught in stone

staring Time
dead in the eye.