Hecate

I saw her again last night

She was in Lightless Alley, amid the garbage skips

and potholes, dead violets in her hair,

fingering burnt dreams, a looseness at her hips.

Her eyes were dark as midnight, her arms so bare

I could see moonlight through them, and she spoke

a silent language that used no keening breath.

As she bent to her tasks unnumbered, the joke,

I saw, was on the living, for she knew only death

amid the syringes and phials, the stark remains

of nights of cold abandon. Just a child

of misery and ivory, dancing arabesques of drains,

amid all the glory we’ve defiled.

And she said her name was Hecate, goddess of the night,

mad and forever young, on a foreign shore

at the edge of limbo, on the verge of sight,

her shoulder-blades pointing to the deep earth’s core.