Ashes

he knows the use of ashes.

he worships god with ashes.

he knows, He knows

he worships God with ashes
---This Mortal Coil

This, which flickers at night
in the skullcap of my thought,
mother-of-pearl snail's trace,
or mica of crushed glass,
isn't light from church or factory
to nourish
red cleric or black .
All I can leave you is
this rainbow in evidence
of a faith that was contested,
a hope that burned more slowly
than hardwood on the hearth.
Keep its powder in your compact
until, when every light is out,
the sardana become infernal,
and a shadwoy Lucifer sweeps down on a prow
on the Thames, the Hudson, the Seine
flowling his pitch-black wings half-
severed from effort to tell you : it's time
It's no inheritance, no talisman
to survive the monsoon's raging
on the spider's thread of memory,
but a history lasts only as ashes
and persistence is pure extinction.
The sign was right: he who saw it
can't fail to find you again.
Everyone makes out his own: pride
wasn't flight, humility wasn't craven.
The thin glimmer striking down here
wasn't that of a match.

Montale, Little Testament