About…

The poem is about the destruction of written literature [or ambiguously - life] by cremation .

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Book 301 is intended to be a collection of poems by Mike Burr for 2010 with no thematic precept.

Winter

the white face of winters ghosts
threading the season of imagining
and introspections bare woodland
and the fading fields of year
looks through its blanched masks
and icicles like sadness eyes a drawn
upon your body burning borne from the red hearthstone
its cooling spirit rising through the flue
drifting unhurried a grey and melancholy veil
across the landscape drawn bleak
by cold toil this way that
a-scavenging
so where is your attainment
its attainted worth in life collected then exuded
by the flickered parliament of heat and truth
its resins etched upon reasons plate
part digested on its palate
in its gullet and the skeletal cavities
of its mortal failings
where marrow has boiled forth
are those carbon grains of rightness corrupted by the world
spent odd and in some shards blanched
against the hearthstones smooth brunet hills
those remnants glower and spits espouse
through sun torrent deeps of nether worlds below
whence our imagination once would run
free and fast like skeltered beasts afraid
when we were but adolescent sheens
small highlights upon the fiery trees of night
so how do you feel in death
my small scripted thing
that had no life yet had that life within its understanding
poorly shown or shaved maybe it deserved the pyre
you gave it for a boat to set upon auroras
slowly mobile seas and tropospheres
what was coalesced has gone
forever to the secret promised places
and wither with the conscience of man

Sources…

Original idea from the tale of the discovery of the Gnostic gospels though the poem doesnt make reference to either the culture or any act and could therefore refer to any act of destruction by fire including human cremation which is obliquely mentioned.

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http://www.gnosis.org/library/marygosp.htm