"Mercy" by Robert Mezey (1987)

In an orgy of silence the moon rose

And we sat looking up. Then the wind

Swaying the flowers with a gentle force

Broke open its sweetness on our foreheads.

She said a word long since forgotten,

And you listened to the beating of your heart,

And just over the mountain one white cloud

Came lordly in the radiance of the night.

Something always escapes us, but then the air

Was a drug that we three blindly inhailed,

Till we were lost to hunger and suffering

And could not but behold and be beholden.

Mercy, she said. Now I remember.

And we sat quiet, under a listening sky.

For a moment it seemed we held it all in our hands,

Then let it go, and that was the best of it all.