Danse Macabré
 
By
 
David Woodward
 
 
 
 
They had eyes
    in the back
of their eyes
 
   looking at their eyes
looking at . . .
 
   if it weren’t for death & decay
one would have no fascination
   with time
 
Enoch ascended to heaven alive
   and death descended . . .
 
into the churchyard of
   the Innocents at Paris
for nine whole days
 
   flesh rapidly decayed
while the dark, middle-aged forest
   moaned leafless an elegiac song
 
before being stripped
   from their new homes . . .
 
a parade of children,
   tapers in their hands,
led the skeletal remains
 
   to be stacked in fine charnel-houses
alongside the cloisters
   where the eyes in the back
  
of their eyes watched
   as death danced triumphantly
only for those
 
   with eyes in the back
of their eyes
   lifeless sockets of
dark, decaying matter . . .
  
   and the middle-aged forest rejoiced.
 

 
 
david woodward aka un-known lives a bridge away from the island of Montreal with his wife and son. Drawn to a place he cannot see, un-known feels his way back to the surface where reality takes on a whole new meaning. In another life he was a field biologist.