This revelation of a solid sky
Feels higher than the one they fill with smoke.
Their helmets—dangling chain mesh veils, deathstroke
Suras enridging every steelbright dome—
Slip off by instinct. They are humbled by
The Sacred Wisdom, not their own, they own
From now on. Gloved hands on their hilts, they wander
Mosaics, pillars, echoes, full of wonder
How much there is to hammer, silence, plunder.

But singing still attends this end of day,
Asthmatic monks at an asmatikon
Like surgeons huddling around a patient
They know, from all the blood loss, too far gone.
Voices are prisms. Light cannot be ancient.
A curved sword slides across each neck the way
A shadow troubles candles at an altar.
The monks, though cut off at their spattered psalter,
Escape into their echoes, singing on.