In the last Act of the Civil War
When the citadel must surely fall
And the plague ran through its sentinels
The king declared war on The Moon
To prove he was a lunatic.
The sentries who jarred every midnight
With screeches from the battlements
That spies had made screeching illegal
And who then threw away their helmets,
Screeching helmets stole their freedom -
The ones, that is, who didn’t drop in droves
Beneath the arrows and ballista bolts
Hurled by the besiegers - therefore opened up
A Second Front throwing pebbles at The Moon
While screeching at its sickled provocations
Beyond the dried-up moats and chewed dogs’ bones
Of the citadel that must surely fall
Its besiegers glowered with envenoming suspicion
At their comrades, hunched to right and left along the trenches’ length
Waiting to be triggered in an instant
To a fratricidal frenzy by a random misjudged glance.
Behind the lines another towering siege engine
Would topple now and then as weeping soldiers,
Affronted by some minutiae of hub design,
Would smash the axles in their fury.
Though it must surely fall, the citadel
Still vibrated underneath each footfall,
Its walls now mostly roots and fungus whistling in the wind,
The gates all long since bricked in, an Empire
As a last redoubt, a few enclosed and shitty acres
Of mossy, mouthy, mean mannered dementia.
And should any future Fortinbras
Be bothered to turn up to torch
The citadel, of course it never fell, and on
The battlefield they’d find
The combatants on both sides, mummified
By gentle breezes, slumping at their stations,
Arms filled up with bluebells growing through their tunics,