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at lantern’s list

that was when we saw it, and our eyes grew wide in shock. well, what else would you expect–what would you do, if you looked up and saw a city walk?

they had convened in secret–not in silence, but unseen, for who of us on level streets had learned what cutstone’s graven cravings mean? say true: the architects knew, and tried to give us warning (in their way), but those blue princes held their pride in hue and humo[u]r hardly heard by we whose homes held sway–that is to say, they bent when breezes blew, so tall they towered. it was a clue, the way those delicate, divine designers cowered on first floors and under ground–but not a one we looked for, and so not a one we found.

the land we drowned ourselves, to hide our shame; we shoveled it by handfuls in the waves.

and so it is our ocean; still it wears our name. we wrote it there when we dove in to chase our swimming citadels, schooled down sunken streets to make those once-so-airy eyries serve as groundless bluegreen graves.

and if you caught our current long enough to ask us why, we’d answer you (in words whose whirls wear the weight of watered wind beneath this weary world’s second sky): we were bold, and so we bled, and there’s all the reason we’ll ever see[k] said.

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