Very, very rough first draft that will need quite a bit of reworking. I had a picture in my head of sad corpses marching on the sea-bed. Yes, I get pictures like that in my head....
The Covenant-Breakers
Along the winding, misty roads now littered with the years
(the hedges are our human loves, the stones, our human fears)
the Sleepers walk their way, with a ceaseless marching beat,
unstoppign and yet weary with an aching in their feet.
In the beginning of The Adam a Covenant was made,
a strand between the sea and land, at which the wave was stayed;
but The Adam broke the Covenant, and cannot breach the breathless sea
that covers the whole of the mortal world as a cold infinity.
Of that ancient time and distant, yet present and so near,
no vision meets our blinded eyes, but we feel it in our fear.
The Spirit moves on the waters that are formless with their void,
but laden with the promise of worlds made, preserved, destroyed;
and the world is spoken into being in the Covenant of Light,
which makes th world be manifest within the Ocean-night.
And in the garden of our living, the God has spoken plain
with words of endless power whose echoes yet remain:
"I give you all creation as a place to rule and play
with this Galahad of witness where I make the sea to stay,
and this the mark of the Pact, which shall endure like the deathless sky,
this the sign of the Covenant: Every man shall die.
For death is the great translation, the surmounting of the sea
that has no end but heaven, no bound but eternity.
As the worm from forth its tomb bursts out with wings of soul,
so mortal man shall ever die, and in dying become whole.
But this gift can turn to curse; if in dying you would be free,
you must make no acquaintance with the bitter destiny --
you must not know as familiar the evil in the good,
for death will come forever if that tree be understood.
If you seek your life in glory, such life is found in death:
in dying you shall live by the power of God's breath;
but when good and evil are mingled, and the truth enmeshed with lie,
then one fate alone can wait you: in dying you shall die.
The longest death, the endless death, is when a man does surely die;
then death is no translation, but a fear beneath the sky,
and beyond the endless firmament, in the byssal depths unfree,
your souls shall wander lost forever, dead beneath the endless sea."
We are the wandering Adam; a sea-surface is our sky.
In life we never know the shore; in death we surely die.
We are the lost sea-creatures, drowning, drowned, and dead;
our path is endless marching on the sandy ocean-bed.
Sad we are, and silent, save with the mutterings of our soul
driven mad by this surest death, dissolving every whole;
eternity within us, in the blessing of the breath,
but we lost the Covenant-sign by the selling of our true death.
As Esau with his potage, we sold our thing of worth
and sleep the sleep of the dying dead, hopeless of all rebirth.
But we dream in our dying slumbers, doomed to certain death,
of a translation of our bodies, a transfiguring of our breath,
in pictures strange and much confused by the slaveries of the sea,
and by our ceaseless fear of dying, from which we still long to be free,
of a time when beyond the seafoam we will be caught up into the air
and on some far and distant shore (they say no sea is there)
we will die no more for dying, but for birth into an endless light
that cannot be covered by a sea, nor quenched by the ocean's night.
But we are the Covenant-Breakers, and as the legeds tell,
in dying we shall surely die, and we live a life called 'hell'.
we are the Faithless Adam, wandering beneath a death-dark sea;
it has no end for the faithless, and no bound but eternity.
