Elegies

"In time every poem becomes an elegy"
- Jorge Luis Borges

And songs turn to silence that swelled

In praise of the pulsing of warm breasts.

Syllables that made enchanted glens

Become their brooding cenotaphs

For the only song inviolate

Is also the song unsung,

The word unwrought

For in the singing and the delving

Lies also the corrupting

And though words crumble slower than flesh,

They yet pass out of memory and know oblivion

Every tongue that speaks knows this and yet

Poets sing in the dark hours, to the weeping stars.