Secret Knowledge

Some talk of the man with a limp and a cough whose shot rang
out from the long-grassed hillock;
of gangstas who drive with no headlights

wasting flashers who they pass in the night;
and wasn't there once a widespread belief,
foretold by Nostrodamus, that temporal thief,
that some sects kill babies every solar eclipse
kissing each other with blood on their lips?
But insights of others can be more esoteric:
of mayhem that swells, chaotic, horrific,
behind souls rushing all at once up to heaven,
saved merely by knowledge of the numeral seven;
of celtic islands where elfin forces
make diamonds and gold from magical sources.
Then there's the man who somehow survives
with his head in a vat and who thinks he's alive
and a secret cabal in control of the rain,
and tell me please, can someone explain
those sightings of Belfast's lost liner
and why no one will talk of the thirty fourth miner?

These are the truths avowed by the few:
if they prove false then the old is the new
and may dragons awake from where they were hurled
and let me fall over the edge of the world.

Peter Keeble