Silhouettes

Silhouettes in the fog,
Street lights and car lights:
Both hazy, mournful.
A moving window slowly
Erects itself around the carpark,
Restricting nothing,
Yet suffocating everything.
Semblances of things, people, unclear,
Appear as shadows in the mist,
Susceptible to a torrent from the sky,
A buffeting from the wind,
Or a homily from the breeze,
Whose whispered words
Are distinctly inaudible,
Just murmurs unaligned -
And thus of no consolation.
But none of these things are constant,
As silence reigns within this haze.

Time slows as depths grow deeper
In the thickening plot:
Bravery rides through
With facile nonchalance -
In a glimpse, it wanes,
Fleeting, like all deceptions,
For even in the grave
The dead have confidants.
Fear betrays its person then,
With a show of trembling limbs
Shaking with the ferocity
Brought on not by a chill but by war.
Movement becomes a dream,
And in this dream,
Where many shapeless vestiges flounder,
One - darker than the rest - grows,
Restlessly,
From a speck in the distance.

Purposeful, it glides through
The chaos of the other shapes:
A bee-line in its own time.
Eternity passes with deathless futility
In the wait for the arrival of
Familiarity’s ordained new guise.
Voices come from the fog,
Urging prayers to tumble
Into the empty mist,
So salvation will strike
Before the hand of the vestige,
Whatever it may be -
But God is just a phantom menace Himself,
And as the Silhouette emerges,
Removing its cloak to reveal itself,
Air flows freely again
While the fog starts to clear -
And it is only you standing before me.