Joel Hawksley Poet Ode

Notes About The Poem

This poem is inspired by the manuscript "Deadly Women."I had the time to focus on it because I recently published "Soul of the Quote" and "The Poetry of Childhood's Charm." Now, I finally have a moment to breathe. I hope readers identify the five women in this poem.

Listen to poem:

Masques of Tyranny

Tyranny wears no single face—
it dances in silk and iron,
in laughter rippling through marble halls,
in jeweled cups brimming with poison.

Here stand five shadows cloaked in power:
the Jade Empress who penned her conquests in ink of blood;
the Blood Countess who bathed in youth’s final heartbeat;
the Poison Queen whose roses wilted on royal lips;
the Thorned Mother sculpting her son into a golden idol of death;
the Icon-Breaker who crushed faith beneath her boot.

They moved like vultures through court and corridor,
each step a measured echo of shattered lives.
Their eyes—cold maps of ambition—
charted the fall of poets, princes, innocents.
Their hands—delicate arbiters of suffering—
wrote edicts that carved screams into walls.

Remember: cruelty is not a garment stitched by men alone.
It blooms wherever power dreams of itself
and drinks deep from the wells of mercy’s undoing.

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