When Every Song Must Be Finally Silenced Poem by Patti Masterman

when every song must be finally silenced
returns then the well intentioned violence;
muted lines the patterned landscape abhor
though more space in volume, than ever world before
to bear the gales down an empty empire's reigning
past borrowed futures that ruling heads feigning
in blood's spindrift tales: hidden days spent maiming
what flood-dammed vessel clasps once were containing;
what's spoken of mostly now in well-cloven riddle:
would the long days of dying that we spent apart
rhyme for- or against- the old rhyming art?

instead, more alone as we stood there now
none of us being more dead, than befouled
like those whose parting rhymes we'd disavowed;
of chanters who'd chanted their poetry, aloud
though once we'd broken off the longboat's prow,
the dancing waves came, then spun us apart,
wreaking the galley's innermost heart
shimmered the wood with a deep-channeled music,
it sustaining no farther; cast moorings aside
the besotted earth rose then, in symbolic fashion
and severed the song, with symphonious tides.