Prayer in Freedom Square, Brno

at the column dedicated to the Holy Virgin
to commemorate the end of the Plague in 1680

Burn
Burn
Burn
Our Lady of Sunlight
Burn for the festering plague-shocked bodies of darkness
Burn for the grotesque, the head-lame, scrabbling shutaways
Burn for the yanked-loose minds wandering out of control
Burn, Our Lady, tall in a tear-drop square
for the heart-famished, the wrung-out ones, the lonely
Burn for the breathless old, beaten back, time-tortured
O Lady burn, if you can, for the bloated-by-power
Burn for the concept, screaming and alive, of genocide
that it was born and that it does not die
Our Lady burn, burn for these swords our fingers
their solo cascades, their flights in concert all played
as an overture to the lordship of the self
O Lady of Brno, till the plague be ended
burn, burn, and with the child you carry
burn too for the small ones on the cobbles
and let a damning darkness not revisit
Burn raging light, O burn for a new age, Lady
of Freedom Square.