An Ending - Current 93

Fourteen long years she lies oh she lies oh

And love as she lies she dreams in white stone

Colonnade marbled and balcony empty

A broken band brokenly marks broken time

Fourteen years she dreams oh she dreams oh

As dreamer she dreams on, as lover entwines

Her limbs grow round his limbs, she drinks from a bottle

She walks through the city she’s lost and then found

Fourteen long years, further back scattered

She sits on some beach and reasons with him

In the secret red moist heart, the most loved and most dark

The flame shaft and fierce dart, the rose-leaf and moss-part

Spreadeagled like starfish, most pain and most fear

Like flower of sea-grass, most fragile and harmless

Most fiery and bloody, most childlike and wrinkled

This starfish, this spider, most wretched and great

Do not cry for me;

let me show you the path

On which we neither come nor go

She smiles at me lake-wide, wet-brown-eyed and dark-skinned

Some dark moon unmoved stalks through our loss

Do not spend this night with me;

I shall make the fallen blind see

This too another broken toy, from broken girl gift to broken boy

I ask my sea-blue rushing mother:

Shall she hear the lions roar?