Rebel Angel’s Last Song - Prose Poem - By Greg Patrick

 

Rebel Angel’s Last Song

Prose Poem 

 

By Greg Patrick

 

 

He stood in earthbound exile like a castaway looking yearningly at a distant sail on the horizon. As for one who faced as many backs.. Those who saw him in passing saw different things.. A veteran soldier returned limping and scarred whose desert camouflage could not hide him from the new enemies of neglect of hunger and those he must fight alone and unaided in urban war zones of nightmare, huntsman of shadow enemies again but of the long shadows cast by the past, now where once he marched in great numbers in his homeland his was a solitary march a champion of light fighting a battle he must undertake alone, a soloist playing the harp half in shadows while others flocked to nightclubs bypassing him. His sigh like a lion’s purr in the primal dark, the last chord of a soloist’s song before packing his case and walking home, a youth who wore long sleeves to conceal bruises with a lion’s eye in sullen challenge to the larger passerby, A shadow boxer’s fists fighting memory’s ghosts. A man now a shadow of himself limping by cane where once he swaggered and strode, A rebel angel passed his age of immortality as the world passed by. 

 

They saw him in all his aspects, but their eyes appraised only at face value, but only when the lone bard of the street corner played at the harp as people began to drift home, playing with a conjuring hand did even the blind see him for what he truly was among the painted desert of facades and bright mirages of the city. The curse suffered by one who forswore a king of vision who made the blind see. Flanked by consoling shadow and street lights like counsel of light and dark vying for his soul. 

 

His touch as soundless as the moon upon the waves. They sensed the aura of darkness surrounding him, like that of an old soldier returned from distant lands haunted by war. And so he was haunted by lovelorn sadness. A wall of backs...nothing more. Keeping to the shadows so long that were to keep him. The night beckoned, the memories drew too close unbidden, and he arose abruptly and sought the solace of the night’s embrace. He weaves the lamp-lit shadows into tapestry as the wrecking ball like time’s pendulum sways. Those below that day of battle saw different things too. The herders and harvesters saw an aerial clash of raptors but the magi with his transcendent sight saw them for what they were and shied from the fall of feathers like midnight’s tears as if they were a hail of fire arrows and as some falcons began to fall in mid-flight to their opponents, they drew back to the deserts to consult the stars and hold council. 

 

Like a falcon laying mortally wounded by huntsman’s arrow, his talons clenching at the stars beckoningly in its final throes as if to descend on his prey from aerial perspective as if confusing skies with earth. But the betrayer’s call always had that effect on the winged huntsmen. An archer instead mimicking a falconer’s cry to bring them down. Like a moth drawn to flame, an Icarus drawn to fatal brightness To a charismatic rabble-rouser basking in light drawing the down-trodden to the march of fire that burnt its raisers in turn. 

 

Evil, the illusionist playing to the crowd. It’s cries almost fledgling- like again like cries of a hidden child and heir to light in the night and then the skies seemed to cry in the voice of a boy over a broken kite as a thing of beauty was once pinned like a butterfly by a cruel child. An innocent moth drawn to the allure of flame the winged were drawn to the false light. Heirs to death but guardians to life. And for his pent-up rage in his soul was that of a rebel angel. One who was betrayed by the beckoning of bright light and who can now only walk the dreamscapes of a soulless word. 

 

Never to go back. To see those die around him but yearn for it the more as they fear it. Like a lion pacing its confines to the jeers of the crowd. he restlessly paces the world and times of mortal man. Behind the anger smoldering in its eyes, a sadness only sated in blood. He arrives with the stars of the eve at the threshold as a harpist to the far courts of Empress and Kings and he played with eerie beauty, guardian of the word to the crowns of mortal thrones.. Until the cause of war arose and he of a certain knew the march of the betrayer Though his songs were shouted down. He spurned the sight and pursuit of blood, walking like A somnambulist in aftermath of their battles. Pausing to restore breath and heal.. “Did we win?” “Win..?” 

 

The detached cold voice was as chill as the wind that stirred fallen banners, the manes of fallen horses and the raiment of men strewn where they went down fighting. He turned away leading the horse. “Know me then by this?’ The angel in mortal man heals as the devil in him kills and while the angel sleeps in the heart the other fire kindles betrayed his eyes till a gentle touch reminds him of what he was and what sons of Adam can be again Like a ruined castle rebuilt. All that remained to one who raised a sword against his lord. .. The sight again of a new dawn gleams in once expressionless eyes And they see the bard standing with a horse eating from his hand, a horse That had fallen with its knight now led by tether.. “Heaven is it?” “No. Not even close…” 

 

Only then the rebel angel cried like a caged falcon for the skies. “One day”, he vowed, “I will leave behind this chrysalis of armor that confines me as the falcon on a tether despairs of not ascending the heights. He looks to those visions like a falcon seeing his brethren revel in the skies about him with beseeching eyes. "When will I be free?" Haloless in a world whose thought patterns were merely cyclical. 

 

He had come full circle, merely going in circles by that halo. Nothing more. As white feathers were given to civilian youths during “the war to end all wars” to shame them into enlisting it seemed all those feathers handed out were made into broken wings and he seemed to wear the burden of all those feathers that hastened men to follow the deception of the banner to fire. He strode impoverished towns and urban war zones like the apparition of a knight haunting the ruins of a once great castle, so still an observant sentinel at the bridge that one might have thought him a statue of a fallen hero immortalised in stone . Like the statue monument of a great rebel who was rendered animate by moonlight steps from the pedestal to walk and mingle with the heirs of that sacrifice. Like a nymph stage of a dragonfly that knows no metamorphosis from the dark waters While others change and take wing beyond the surface and out of his element like the traveler exiled to the corner in the school dance. 

 

He seemed to glide rather than stride, with the air of a penniless prince, his ragged trenchcoated hems whispering on the stones like a flightless falcon crutching on broken wings though casting a shadow before him of a falcon soaring in slow motion as if guided by an elusive dream of restoration. Sleepwalker though profoundly conscious of the restless dreamscapes of the heart. The squalor of the slums he roamed like the ruins of a lost city, were unnerving to behold. The Sunken-cheeked begged for alms in the shadow of the dilapidated soot-tarnished walls. Its uncouth denizens that congregated in circles by the patches of lights now when night fell laughed in crude mirth as if to keep the dark and foreboding at bay. None wanted to be alone. But silence befell and they parted like rabble before a lord as a lone figure strode in a high demeanour. Like nocturnal scavengers dispersing before a true hunter of the night. 

 

He strode with a cold determined precision with a pantherine stealth, soundless a ghost as had ever haunted the night yet haunted the more so. The very night seemed to shudder at his presence, ushering in the dark itself, trailing shadows in his wake. They averted their eyes from him, shuddered as if they felt his shadow on them. A shadow that was cast long by the lamps so that it covered the street in darkness, looming largely upon the buildings before he dematerialised into the shadows … He paused then, crestfallen in solitude at the bridge, eyes delving at the reflectionless dark waters, like a pearl diver of the Orient on brink of depths yearning after the promise of a pearl that is star of the fathoms and ever beyond his reach. In vigil sleepless as the eternal flame of the stars. By the shoreside of night he sees a falling star as if for his sight alone and he remembers what is to fall. 

 

He walked the lamp post-lit avenues while mortals slept. He could hear the blood chant of their hearts like a tribal drumbeat in the dark. He could hear the crying of men in the night like the verses of a forbidden song. Only the dead do not cry. 

 

Being a rebel angel but angel nonetheless, he heard their words, their urgings like offerings made to the stars delivered as if by breathless emissary to a distant court. 

 

He strode as red dreamscapes of leaves swirled around him like an ebb and flow of a turn of the tide around the shanks of a rightful prince returned from exile at the head of an army with dark memories in the wake following a red horizon to a distant light. And betrayed by a sigh in depths of a soulful eye brimming with tears like blood from old wounds reopened. 

 

Haunted by daydreams of paradise and nightmares of burning people in between the worlds he left behind. Like a walk across a suspension bridge over dark waters. Not absence of light but more presence of healing dark where the brave can at last turn to cry as if taken under a rebel angel’s wing, as protective as that which hides a rebel returning from route under cover of night. He looked to the night sky like a celestial battle zone. Like a fighter pilot stranded in enemy territory… “Grant me wings again and I’ll fight once more..” he yearned. home.. A moonbeam like an apparitional spotlight from parted clouds Like a border watchtower’s searchlight pausing and illuminating on an isolated Rebel. 

 

Blinded by moonlight as he had once been by another bringer of light. In the restless dark of the city alleyways where street lamps and shadow seemed in it’s wavering of shadow to be the ghost waves of a dead sea a crestfallen suitor strays aimless in a staggering stride, casting down a wilted rose like an accusation at dream’s door or an offering by a pilgrim on a broken shrine. 

 

A street musician like his own shadow cast by the lamps detached, retrieves the rose like a bird with broken wings and as he raises it as if to the ghost of a lost love gone too soon its petals open and bloom again in fast-forward and as he reads the words on the crumpled page the letters themselves glow like breath on an ember, an illuminated manuscript lit in celestial inspiration. 

 

And like a Victorian lamplighter balanced precariously he seemed to light the stars and for the first time since the war-time blackouts they could be seen through the city lights. A lost soul looking for its kindred in the passerby’s glance seeing ghosts in the shadows calling to him by name and dreams he calls after by name only to know echoes in reply in a soulless world and lordless sky. As if under cover of night he takes under his broken wing those broken for the duration of a sigh that is heard in the heavens like a battle cry, for he is no less an angel for a broken wing then a maneless lion is any less a lion. 

 

Ears keen a tiger pacing a night cage he hears the sleepless cries of widows in the night, the nightmare-haunted sleep of soldiers in the throes of memory and he remembers too the battles fought among the stars. Like a tiger who obeys the instinct of a door left ajar to run wild again to rally to the birthright of liberation cold and dark of night beckoning to find a captor’s final betrayal only to be slain…but only then to be free again. He heeds the call to a defense of a daughter of Eve and then kneels in his own blood like a knight at vigil on a crimson carpet. Like a pilgrim before a broken shrine...knowing why at last mortal man turns their back on the angels. Then a handless up-lifting as if a warrior borne slain from the aftermath night like a plane traveling to a distant isle of warmth and beauty from a cold city. Now he smiles “I am free…” The threshold is unguarded, the door again brightly ajar. “Who goes there the gatesman cries..” “I know you. Welcome back. It’s been too long.” 

 

Listening over the sigh of waves homesick for light afar listening keenly as a huntsman to the night like the mountaineer seeking prized rest of eagles, the aerie’s distant cry to say you can go home again. Like a falconer’s familiar voice calling him back and the heraldry of his cry to a shining castle gate was like a returned knight’s hailing a guardsman to announce he has returned again to his lord like the sun setting into the hills and sea.

Greg Patrick - A dual citizen of Ireland and the states, Greg Patrick is an Irish/Armenian traveller poet and the son of a Navy enlisted man. He is also a former Humanitarian aid worker who worked with great horses for years and loves the wilds of Connemara and Galway in the rain where he's written many stories. Greg spent his youth in the South Pacific and Europe and currently resides in Galway, Ireland and sometimes the states.