The Taking of Carcassonne
Languedoc, 1247

The castle sprawls tawny-haunched over the hill,
charred broken stems where the wheat doesn't grow,
ash glows in hollows where wind cannot go,
ash piles against tents and the catapult wheels.

Soot stains the arrow slits, blackens the walls,
the Pope's clean banners fly over the towers,
broken pikes clutter the small shredded bowers,
the heretics' bodies are dragged down stone halls

to the garden courtyard lit red by great fires.
The legate watches Catari thrown on the pile,
crosses his arms over fine-linked steel mail,
regards his lord's banners with satisfied eyes.

His guards wanted signs to tell false from true,
"Kill them all, God will know his own," he had said.
The bonfire collapses in sparked roars of red,
the thick oily smoke mushrooms up against blue.

A boulder squats ash-covered outside Carcassonne,
the shape of a dove chiseled out of the granite,
against the black wall its gold image is lit,
released from the rock by the swift-setting sun.