Resonance

My seniors are reading Beowulf, and recently wrote an awesome round of poems of desolation in response. After I read them aloud in class, M asked, "Where's yours?"

Here it is...

[Carrion Doom]

Darkness reigned
Reigned down through the peril in our hearts, negating life, negating
The smallest flames, the greenest shoots, up through the
Blistering snow, grey wash of death
Mirrored in the eyes of all who
Prayed in the midst of our desolation
We cried beyond tears, we cried a desert’s worth of
Desecration, we envisioned ourselves
The carrion of a darkness
The length of the infinity
Between two numbers
That long stretch
Beyond gloom, beyond despair, beyond
The dimness that ruled our stolen hearts.
Words echoed off the walls of our minds, ghosts
In the wind, ghosts borne of terror and the
Smallness of rodent courage.
The quest for birth was feeble,
Mincemeat churning the feeble tissues
The aching bone-lappings
The feeblest of whispers
Careening through the arteries
Rivers of fear, capillaries of doom
Triggered by the last possible
Dream lost in the narrows
Prayers of dissipation, prayers
That rifle memory, dead memory
A string of lost consciousness
Green mountains, green fields
Before the grey warriors shattered
The dream-sanctuaries of orchid bloom.
The gods disdained us, the chasms
Divided weak from weak—there
Was no strength in us.
One child
Distaffed torment
Chaos in the tendrils of her hair—
Violet abyss, empurpled souls—
I cannot sing past the night’s shadows
Caustic disarray, caustic sentiment,
A scathing dirge to the lost,
The lambent violence of the failing light.