untitled

Write a poem by filling in the blanks: part of a poem titled “Red” by Gillian Jerome

The purple cloaked angel inhabits the corpse.

Grows in the colon like mushrooms flourishing in darkness:

 obedient and delectable.  Enchanted by prayer, she gazes up

toward the bell tower , prods the heretic and the believer

simultaneously  wanting to become

the equalizer

 of the tortured saints.  Yellowed bone

feeds dirt with its  memorized torment.

Copses of  aralia elata frame what once was the burial spot of bishops.

While larks with angel voices circle eye shaped courtyards

 feeding on night worms.

Buds grow like starved and crippled orphans through the cursed hedgerow.

Shoot the bishop, he commands,

Before he is able to demand penance.   Fall falls soon

 on the  dead bishop’s casket

cold in the frost-heaved earth.  Clouds

repudiate the snow wished for by dead bishops praying

In the busted bell tower, now overgrown.

cats murmur at the feet of gravediggers.  Raptors swirl like men on the death-defying trapeze

at the heads of mourners 

Red doesn’t bother the dearly departed.

 They embrace all the colours of the angels’ frocks and use their newly-grown wings

 To sweep fog off the roads

To man the manholes and freshly filled graves

To relinquish the mitre from the saintly bishop’s head

 then tear it in shreds to meld with blackened clay.

Birds will forever  line their nests, gently

in red and never forsake it for another colour.

They lie awake in anticipation of the leaves on the trees in the copse in the fall, turning red.

Creating, peaceful memories of using wings unfurled and quiet

mostly keeping the sky clear and blue.

Look at all the birds with bits of red: clamped so tightly in beaks rushing to nest.

Birds and the corpses of  bishops are not as unlike as you may think.