Hi, guys. It's been a while. I've been spending the past year working on a Fantasy novel. Here's a poem from that novel that explains one of the antagonist's motivations. Hope you like it. :)
Lamentation from Silent Sepulchral Depths
High sun
and low sun
and all the suns between.
Her father fished the sea with a wide net.
Her mother was strung on a string
and carried into the sky.
And the fisherman’s daughter danced
on the stones on the shore at high-tide.
Her jewelry was made of shells she’d string
on an old fishing line.
High-tide.
Low-tide.
The tide rolls in
and the tide rolls out.
And there is the undertow.
And dancing on the rocks along the shore
at high-tide,
she could sometimes reach down
and retrieve a pearl-bearing friend from the waters.
She never found an oyster with a perfect pearl,
but she always loved
her mother of pearl.
And the motherless daughter danced with
Mother of pearl
shifting on old fisherman’s line.
She danced strung on a string and shifted
like a marionette.
She was caught in the wide net
and pulled from the sea.
Pulled through the burnt smoke smell
of village markets.
Pulled across the paved
stone highways that
cut through the hills,
cut through pastureland,
cut through child dreams.
Pulled through palatial valleys
of marble and glass and gold
to be strung on a string
and dance for a Deified Despot--
cold masked cutthroat and king to kings.
And her dancing eyes
played on a boy blighted with a malformed frame.
And she gifted the blighted boy pearls of kindness
and the soft sighs of the sea from
shells collected in child days.
And she gifted the blighted boy
wet tears of a kind heart
for the singed fingers that opened arcane scrolls
to read her epic poems of a past people.
And the Deified Despot
(cold masked cutthroat and king to kings)
coveted her visionary form
and hungered for her soft-hewn limbs
and took her down deep in the undertow.
High-tide
Low-tide
and all the lifeless beauties that wash ashore.
She was strung on a string for all to see.
And the boy of malformed frame
wept with salty waters from the sea.
Wept and lamented the death of love and of dancing forms.
Wept and was carved and consumed in flame and cast aside
to die the spirit’s endless death.
High sun and
and low sun
and all the suns between.
Between high sun and
low,
when crimson petals open
and frost melts to dew
and blood rises
the High Tide comes
to drag down cold masked cutthroats
in the Endless Undertow.
