Scarce had it rain'd - blue hued
drops showering down;
in the witching hour I rode,
where the earth is overrun by weeds,
yellow fringed with black-eyed-susans;
trees overhung with wild cherries.
Pacing past the sequester'd glen,
following the trail where tall beeches grow:
long sleeved and long limb'd;
and leaves falling in curling frills.
Then I heard a merry song;
a fiddle played, from the hills beyond.
soon turning round a winding bend,
a field of dripping june bells;
I sighted them, a thousand and more
in blue slippers scatter'd wide.
Seated myself on a moss cover'd stone,
as one aptly does after a long ride.
Somewhere beats an earthly heart,
someone breathes a heaving sigh;
Eyes turn to the darken'd clouds hanging by,
and to the lowering skies;
then far to the place where airy spirits roam,
and to the sepulchred ground
where unruffled I lie in my grave,
under the tufts of june bells.
© 24/4/2013, Gautami Phookan, All rights reserved.
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Categories:
sepulchred, beauty, death,
Form: Verse
Held fast!
Ruthlessly trapped in a white sepulchred vice
that slowly, inexorably, crushes all hope.
Starving we wait, with lips black and caked,
all frozen in a wasteland of ice and snow;
revealing desolation and utter despair that
relentlessly flows, to an uncertain death.
We, officers and men, who’d aspired so high,
had failed to spot the strange irony
of our two ships’ names – ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’!
Darkness and horror now stalks each soul,
icily gripping us, in manacled madness.
Naked we entered this imperfect world,
born to long suffering and adversity.
Dare we bear arms against this dread fate?
Or, meekly succumb to what destiny holds,
shorn now of all means, to sustain our lives?
In the bleakness and sorrow of that long winter’s night,
we watched the fell stars of mighty Ursa,
circling, like bears, in the spangled blackness,
remorselessly hunting each human soul
…to a grizzled end.
Categories:
sepulchred, death, history,
Form: Free verse